A Corpus-based Study On Resultative Construction In English Writing

Resultative construction,characterized by distinctive and complex structure,has been a major focus of study on the English syntax-semantics interface.Researchers have investigated this cross-linguistic phenomenon from various perspectives.A significant body of research has emerged and fruitful results have yielded in recent fifteen years.Nonetheless,little work has honed in on the Chinese English learners'use of English resultative construction.Accordingly,the present study is designed to explore the Chinese EFL(English as a foreign language)learners' use of resultative construction in English writing.Within the theoretical framework of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis,this corpus-based study is designed to carry out two kinds of comparisons:(a)the comparison between native language and interlanguage,and(b)comparison between interlanguages.Based on these two comparisons,the present study aims to answer the following research questions:1)In terms of the frequency of use in English writing,how are the Chinese English learners different from or similar to the native speakers and among themselves?2)With regard to the selection of primary predicate,what are the characteristics of the English learners in comparison with native speakers and among themselves?3)In respect of the selection of resultative complement,what are the characteristics of the English learners in comparison with native speakers and among themselves?Three sub-corpora(ST2,ST3,and ST6)of Chinese Learner's' English Corpus(CLEC)and Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(LOCNESS)were selected as the learner corpus and reference corpus respectively.Ten verbs were chosen to be the search terms for collecting English resultative construction from the four corpora.By resorting to the powerful concordance tool AntConc 3.4.4w,all the English resultative constructions containing the targeted verbs were collected.The raw data was processed by SPSS 17.0.Major findings of the present study are summarized as follows.In terms of the frequency of use in English writing,to start with,there are striking differences among Chinese EFL learners of different proficiency level.In particular,senior high school English learners use more English resultative constructions in their writing in comparison with the other two higher language proficiency levels.Another noteworthy fact is that English majors in Grade 3 and 4 employ the smallest number of this distinctive yet complicated construction in writing,ranking in the bottom among the three different English proficiency levels.Moreover,there are significant differences between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers.Senior high school students and college students in Grade 1 and 2 use far more resultative constructions in their English writing than native speakers.Junior and senior English learners are quite congruent with the native speakers on this point.Additionally,Chinese EFL learners with different language proficiency level are divergent on selecting the primary predicate for resultative construction in English writing.In general,it is particularly noticeable that Chinese EFL learners at each proficiency level are inclined to choose intransitive verbs to play the part of primary predicate in the English resultative construction.Differences have also been found between Chinese English learners and native speakers.Chinese English learners at beginning and intermediate level tend to over-use the intransitive verbs as the primary predicate while the advanced English learners are much similar to native speakers.With regard to the selection of resultative complement,data indicated that there are significant differences among Chinese EFL learners at different learning stage and between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers.What is more,Chinese English learners tend to choose prepositional phrase to serve as the resultative complement for the English resultative construction in writing,which is in sharp contrast to native speakers who would more likely to employ adjective phrases.In the end of the study,several pedagogical implications were provided based on the major findings.First of all,it is of paramount significance to introduce the concept of construction in English teaching.Secondly,it is of great necessity to underscore the significance of semantic meaning of structures.At last,it is genuinely essential to provide more input relevant of English resultative construction in textbooks or other language learning materials,with the aim of helping students gain a better understanding of English resultative construction.