A Study Of The Acquisition Of Psych Verbs In English

Psych verbs are those that are used primarily to descirbe states of mind or changes in states of mind (Levin, 1993). These verbs have two arguments, typically called Experiencer and Theme. Sometimes the Experiencer is in the Object position and sometimes it is in the Subject position. Psych verbs are so difficult for second language learners of English because they can link identical argument to different syntactic position.The essential difference between Chinese and English is that English has productive pattern of synthetic EO (experiencer object) verbs whereby there is a zero CAUS(causative) morpheme encoded lexically with an EO verbs root, while Chinese has a productive pattern of periphrastic EO verbs which are composed of an overt causative morpheme shi meaning"make"and an adjective.This thesis attempts to study the acquisition of English psych verbs for Chinese learners from a perspective of Theta Theory. On the basis of the former studies and researches, four hypotheses are purposed in this thesis, then an empirical study is conducted to test these four hypotheses. The results obtained from the tasks showed that on the whole, all the L2 learners were fairly accurate on both ES and EO verbs; however, they, in particular the low level Chinese learners, did have some difficulty with EO but not ES verbs. These findings support the hypothesis that EO verbs are more difficult than ES verbs. In addition, the results also show that L2 Chinese learners are very keen on the periphrastic get-construction and make-construction. This suggests that L1 transfer does play a role in the acquisition of English psych verb.