An Empirical Study Of English Motion Verb+Path Construction ( MVPC) Acquisition By Chinese English Learners

Verbs play an important role in English. As far as the simple SVO sentence pattern is concerned, a sentence cannot be born without a verb. Among English verbs, motion verbs are the prototypical ones, with high frequency and complex collocation. They are often regarded as one of the most difficult and important verbs for Chinese English Learners (CELs). Hence, they have received great attention from researchers. Current studies of motion verbs are conducted mainly from the perspectives of Cognitive Linguistics and lexicalization, and most of the researches are in theoretical discussions. There is insufficiency in studying the acquisition of English motion verbs. Therefore, it is of theoretical and practical significance to find out the acquisition law of motion verbs, in an attempt to facilitate verb teaching.On the basis of Event Frame Theory, Tamly (1996) proposes the Windowing of Attention Theory in which he viewed the adverbial of location as the PATH element of motion event. By analyzing the cognitive process of the foregrounding of a certain element in the event frame, he holds that in linguistic expressions, a speaker can foreground a certain stage of the PATH, initial, medial and final, by opening the window of attention. This essay conducts an empirical study of motion verb +path construction (MVPC), (such as run from, travel through, go to), on the ground of Talmy's hypothesis and Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar, and tries to find out the acquisition law by CELs. Three hypotheses concerning MVPC are put forward and the experimental results show that:1. It is easier for CELs to learn the prepositions representing final path windowing than that of initial path windowing, and the medial path windowing comes in the end in MVPC. We can conclude the hierarchy as final path windowing>initial path windowing>media path windowing.2. The acquisition of single path windowing is not easier than that of double path windowing in MVPC by CELs.3. The acquisition of non-metaphorical path windowing is easier than that of metaphorical path windowing in MVPC.The author designs two sets of tests involving 10 motion verbs as tools in the experiment. 156 subjects are divided into three groups to participate in the tests and the collected data is analyzed by applying SPSS13.0. Some pedagogical implications are discussed and suggestions for future research are proposed.