A Study On Lexicalized Causative Verbs’ Errors Committed By Chinese Students Of English Major

Causative expression is human’s imitation and conceptualization of cause-effectrelations in the real world. Due to the universality of causative phenomenon, thecausative verb becomes an important category in the course of language acquisition.For the same semantic concept, English tends to use lexical approach, i.e. lexicalizedcausative verb, to express causative meaning; while Chinese tends to use syntacticapproach, that is, analytic (periphrastic) causative structure to express causativemeaning. Currently, there are few studies on the errors of lexicalized causative verbsat home. Therefore, this thesis aims to investigate the common errors of lexicalizedcausative verbs made by English major students, and to explore the potential causeswith the aim to improve English vocabulary teaching and learning.Based on the common errors found in English teaching and learning, threegroups of causative verbs, i.e. psych causatives, cognitive causatives and involve typecausatives, are selected to be tested in the study. The semantic features of the threegroups of verbs are also analyzed in detail. Two methods are used to investigate theerrors of the three groups of verbs. Method I is a translation task, with200Englishmajor students as its subjects. Method II adopts corpus approach. The data are takenfrom the sub-corpora St5and St6of CLEC and WECCL sub-corpus of SWECCL.This study tries to answer three questions:(1) Is there relationship between students’English learning level and the errors they make?(2) What errors do students makewhile using lexicalized causative verbs in language production activities?(3) Whatare the potential causes of the errors?The data result shows that, first, the errors of lexicalized causative verbs arerelated with students learning level. With longer years of English learning and moreinput of language, higher grade students make fewer errors than lower grade students.Second, totally there are seven types of errors found in students’ translation andcorpora. The overuse of “make+Object+Complement” is common among the threegroups of lexicalized causative verbs. For cognitive and involve type causative verbs, which are usually attached with fixed preposition in active structure, students oftenneglect or misuse the prepositions. In addition, using lexicalized causative verbs instatal passive structure (be+V-ed+prep.) is also a great difficulty for students. Themain errors are the missing of be,-ed form, and preposition or misuse of preposition.The main causes of the above errors are as follows:(1) Interlingual andintralingual transfer. Students are influenced by Chinese “使...”,“令...”,“让...”constructions or the previously learned English “make+Object+Complement”structure.(2) Ignorance of English language rules. Students usually neglect the fixeduse of prepositions, the three key elements of statal passive structure (be+V-ed+prep.),and the complex usages of some causative verbs;(3) The semantic complexity oflexicalized causative verbs (conflation of [PROCESS] and [RESULT] in a verb andthe absence of causer).Based on the above results, this thesis proposes three pedagogical suggestions:(1) Using contrastive analysis approach. By comparing Chinese and Englishcausative sentences, teachers can draw students’ attention to the subtle differencesbetween the two languages and show them the predicted errors.(2) Raising students’ awareness of the features of lexicalized causative verbs.Teachers should deepen students’ sensitivity to the implicit [CAUSE] semanteme andthe syntactic representation of lexicalized causative verbs.(3) Using corpus learning approach. Teachers can use prepared material orencourage students to use free web-corpus. Let students discover the languagefeatures by themselves, thus train them as more autonomous learners.