A Study On Chinese College Students’ Acquisition Of English Argument Structure

Verb-argument structure has aroused great interest of numerous researchers both at home and abroad. From traditional Chomsky’s Universal Grammar to nowadays psycholinguistics, a great many of articles have been published to voice their unique understanding about this issue. Among mainstream theories and hypotheses, the following four have offered brand new perspectives on it. First, the verb-specific concepts hypothesis proposed by McRae et al.(1997) suggests that verb-argument structure is conceptually shaped through everyday experience. Second, Construction Grammar postulates that top-down information is provided by the construction and that bottom-up information is provided by the verb. Third, event-frame semantics demonstrates that event-frame not only determine verb’s meaning but also the argument structure. Last, theories and hypotheses about acquisition of verb-argument structure, from syntactic boostrapping to Computational Model, have provided valuable information about how children learn verb-argument which then could be employed to shed light on second language learning and teaching.Due to the deficiency of the prior researches about argument structure only having taken native speakers as the research subjects, resulting that the theories derived from these empirical researches could only be applied to those native-language-speaking communities, the present study takes the cross-language perspective to investigate whether Chinese college students’comprehension on the use of nouns and verbs in the argument structures is consistent with the results of previous abroad studies, since Chinese students learn English as a foreign language and acquire Chinese as their mother tongue. Specifically, this thesis aims at:(1) investigating whether a verb plays a dominant role in the verb-argument structure, which is the core element of the verb,(2) exploring predictive effects of nouns for verbs,(3) shedding some light on second language acquisition, by answering the question whether there is relationship between level of language proficiency and use of verb-argument structure, and the implication for second language teaching.An off-line investigation is conducted to tap the dominant effects of the verb and predictive effect of the noun through4tasks, named writing English sentences based on the verbs provided, completing the sentences with patient nouns, completing sentences with a verb, and generating a verb based on the noun given and then using this noun-verb pair to create an English sentence. The main results are listed as follows:(1) Verb imposes syntactic and semantic constrains on its arguments which makes the verb lies at the heart of verb-argument structure.(2) Noun can activate the general semantic field knowledge in which the verb and other arguments occur, and constrain the following verb and arguments in the verb-argument structure.(3) The comprehension of the usage of verb and noun in the verb-argument structure reflects event schema stored in people’s mind which is not related to the subjects’ second language proficiency.To sum up, these results indicate that Chinese-speaking college students may acquire English verb-argument structure just as children who acquire English as their mother tongue do, reflecting that they experience the same cognitive process during the conceptualization of verb-argument.More importantly, these conclusions bring us many implications in second language learning and teaching. One implication is situated teaching. In this approach, language teacher should respect students’ previous experience on which new lesson designs are constructed at first, and then provide learners holistic eventual information from which learners discover whatever knowledge they are interested in. Another implication is to guide students to better perform cloze tests. The combination of predictive ability and other kinds of knowledge makes the correct answers possible. This implication should arouse enough attention from teachers to make more efforts when teaching new and difficult verbs and nouns and helping students enhance the ability of prediction.