The Confusion with “Give” and “Get” by Japanese Learners: Common Errors in the Basic Meaning of Property Transfer

Lee Hughes,Christopher Colpitts,Michael Gale

doi:10.4236/ojml.2021.112019

Abstract

The prototypical semantic meaning and syntactic structures of “give” and “get” from the perspective of the “transfer of property” causes Japanese students at the University level a lot of trouble in both verbal and written discourse. The purpose of this study was to try to uncover the possible mental links these students were making with these verbs, and find out how these two very important and interrelated verbs are being misused, possible reasons for this misuse, and how they can be better understood and produced by Japanese learners of English. Through this research, it would appear that more comprehensive pedagogical practice that encourages students to see and experiment with the fuller ranges of verbs and their complements could help students to understand and produce these verbs more enthusiastically, confidently, and competently. In order to conduct this research, a test was administered to 96 students with fourteen questions separated into three sections, completed within ten minutes. The results showed that, generally speaking, it appears as if the students are having an extremely hard time reproducing the correct usage of both “give” and “get” in the second language (L2). More research should be conducted to find out more about the reasons for the difficulties and how Japanese students can successfully overcome them.

Highlights

Grammatical complements as well as lexical collocations create vast semantic implications for “give” and “get”
The test questions were as follows: Question 1a—target response “Steve got a present from Tony”. (a) ステイブはトニーからプレゼントを貰った。 Question 1b—target response “Tony gave a present to Steve”. (b) トニーはステイブにプレゼントをあげた。 Question 1c—target response “This present was given to Steve by Tony”. (c) このプレゼントはトニーからステイブに贈られた。 Question 1d—target response “Children get presents at/on Christmas” (d) クリスマスの日子供達が贈り物を貰う。 Question 2a—target response “Chris gave the ball to Ikumi” Question 2b—target response “Chris got the ball from Ikumi” Question 2c—target response “The ball is given to Chris by Ikumi” Question 2d—target response “Ikumi gets/got the ball from Chris” Question 3.1 “It is a custom in Canada to a gift to your family at Christmas.”
Hulstin and Laufer (2001: p. 539) reiterate this point, saying that long term memory retention of vocabulary was highest among comprehension tasks, lower in the reading plus fill-in, and lowest in the reading only groups

Summary

Introduction

Grammatical complements as well as lexical collocations create vast semantic implications for “give” and “get”. The grammatical choice and placement of the preposition complements alone can alter the semantics of the entire utterance. How the learner is able to understand and even produce these kinds of sentences is a matter for testing and the study of the internal lexicon. A vast majority of Japanese learners of English at the tertiary level, having had six years of mombusho (Education Ministry) language training seem to have difficulty when reproducing polyvalent or transitive verbs (written or spoken) such as “give” and “get”, especially when they require a direct and/or indirect object, and more so if a preposition phrase is required

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion