A Study Of The Acquisition Of English Prepositions Under,below And Beneath By Chinese EFL Learners Based On Principled-polysemy Model

Cognitive linguistics has provided a new perspective for second language acquisition study.It can reveal the underlying psychological mechanisms and the cognitive process of language comprehension and production of the second language learners.Especially in the field of polysemy study,cognitive methods are used to study the complex semantic network and semantic consistency of English polysemy systematically.Within the framework of cognitive linguistics,a polysemy has many different but correlated senses and these distinct senses are around its core sense,which consists of a complete semantic network.Some cognitive linguistic theories,such as prototype theory(Correa-Beningfield,1990),metaphor theory(Lakoff & Johnson,1980)and image schema theory(Lakoff & Johnson,1987),have been applied to study the polysemy phenomenon.Among them,the “principled ploysemy model”(Andrea Tyler & Vyvyan Evans,2003)on the basis of previous researches has gained much attention.Andrea Tyler and Vyvyan Evans(2003)proposed that the semantic network of a particular preposition is composed of its proto-sense and other orderly distinct senses.As three prepositions under,below and beneath are easy to be confused and used wrongly,Chinese EFL learners have encountered problems in acquisition of these three prepositions.At present,researches on English polysemous prepositions based on the principled-polysemy model have become very common.For example,Ijaz(1986)conducted the reasearch on on,onto,upon,on top of,over and above.Navarro I Ferrando and Ricker(2001)conducted the reasearch on in,on,at.At home,Ma Shuhong(2005)conducted the reasearch on in,on,over.Cai Jinting and Li Jia(2008)conducted the research on above,over,under,below.However,the comparative study on under,below and beneath is still very rare.Therefore,the present research investigated the acquisition of under,below and beneath of English learners at different English levels within the framework of principled polysemous network.The present study chooses 80 students as research subjects.Group 1 is 40 grade 3students in the Affiliated Middle School of Xinzhou Teachers University,who representsthe low English level group.Group 2 is made up of 40 juniors in English major from the Shanxi Normal University,who represents the high English proficiency level.The research adopts the free-sentence generation task,sentence completion task and the retrospective interview as the research instruments.The processed data and collected responses are used to answer two research questions.1.How is the acquisition of English spatial prepositions under,below and beneath of Chinese EFL learners at different English levels?2.Are there any differences in the acquisition of all senses of English spatial prepositions under,below and beneath between high level English learners and low level ones?The research results are as follows:1.The acquisition results of English spatial prepositions under,below and beneath of Chinese EFL learners in G1 and G2 are not satisfying.They fail to establish the complete semantic networks.The results reveal that their acquisition of the primary sense is much better than those peripheral senses for both groups at different English level.2.Generally,Chinese EFL learners with high English level indeed acquire under,below,beneath much better than those low English level learners.However,there is not much difference in acquisition of some peripheral senses between the G1 and G2 and their overall acquisition situation of peripheral senses is not satisfying,such as the being-subject sense and classification sense of under;topographical distance sense of below;not-good enough sense of beneath.In addition,the possible reasons causing difficulties of under,below,beneath are also investigated by the interview.The major possible reasons are teaching strategies,compilation of English textbooks,mother language transfer and so on.