A Study Into Particle Placement Of Chinese ESL Learners

This research is a replication of Gries' (2004) study on English particle placement in the verb-particle construction (the VPC) among native speakers with the aim to find out: what will happen if the same research method is applied on Chinese English learner? In what degree are the results of these two researches similar with each other? Will the same Processing Hypothesis which underlies Gries' (2004) work be applicable to the non-native speakers?This research is based on the following facts: First, the research by Gries (2004) distinguishes itself form all the other studies alike in that he adopted a corpus based multifactorial analysis on the causal influence to particle placement in the VPC and based his research on the Processing Hypothesis of the influence of the processing load on the choice of particle placement. While other approaches on this topic, such as the syntactic approach (Biberauer & Roberts, 2005; Farrell, 2005) has been criticized as introspective in nature and too much relying on the well-formed sentences and the linguists' intuition (Gries, 2004; Lohse, Hawkins, & Wasow, 2004). And most of the cognitive approaches focus on only one or two influential factors among all the potential factors or treat these factors in isolation for this variation of placement of particle and direct object (Gries, 2004). Second, most of the researches of this topic on Chinese learners of English are diagnostic and data-descriptive generalizations for the pedagogical purpose in nature. They can not interpret the mechanism underlying the superficial alternation of the particle and objective in the VPC.The data for this research are from the CLEC (Gui & Yang, 2005). Wordsmith is used to locate all the co-occurrences of ten most frequent particles(up, out, off, down, in, away, back, over, on and around )and ten most frequent verbs(put, bring, take, turn, throw, pull, call, get, keep and kick) used in Gries' (2004) research. After randomized selection following the data-filtering rules in Gries' (2004) study, forty groups of data are extracted (Samples in Appendix A). These data are grouped into morphosyntactic, semantic or discourse-functional variables respectively and are assigned working definitions in the way that their influence to particle placement can be calculated.After processing the selected data through SPSS (Version 12) to calculate the correlation coefficients of the variables in mono-factorial analysis, the relative strengths of these...