A Study Of English Resultative Construction Acquisition By Chinese College Students

Structural approach, transformational approach and cognitive approach haveelaborated and developed the theories of the English resultative construction fromvarious perspectives. On the basis of the construction grammar and the factorsaffecting language acquisition as the theoretical framework, this study aims to exploreChinese college students’ acquisition of the English resultative construction and thefactors that affect the acquisition from the cognitive perspective. This study tries toanswer the following two research questions:1. What type of English resultative construction do Chinese college studentsacquire best and what type do they acquire worst?2. What are the factors that affect Chinese students’ acquisition of Englishresultative constructions?This paper is an empirical study, the participants of which are the non-Englishmajor students in their junior year. The study analyzes college students’ acquisition ofEnglish resultative construction by means of questionnaire survey. Firstly, the studydoes a quantitative research to analyze the frequency of three types of resultativeconstruction and then classifies the reasons of their answers. In the end, the study doesa qualitative analysis about the reasons.The findings of this study are as follows:(1) differences exist in Englishresultative construction acquisition by Chinese college students. When they expressresultative meaning, Selected Resultative Construction (SRC) is the most acceptablefor students; Unselected Resultative Construction (URC) is the worst acceptable forstudents; and Intransitive Resultative Construction (IRC) is in between. This meansthat students do not have a good acquisition English resultative construction. Whenthey express resultative meaning, they are inclined to use non-English resultativeconstruction;(2) there are three factors that affect the students’ acquisition. The firstfactor is that college students put verb in the most important place in the sentence.The second factor is that college students focus on the syntactic structure more thansemantic meaning. The last one is Chinese transfer on the acquisition of ERC.The implications of the study are that:(1) English teacher should introduce theconstruction concept that construction is the pairings of form and meaning, which canhelp students learn sentence from a new perspective;(2) English teachers should emphasize verb is not the central part of the sentence. Teachers should introduce theinteraction between the construction and verb in the sentence and construction’scoercion on verb, which can help students learn English resultative construction andother constructions.