| The relationship among verbs,sentence forms and sentence meaning has been the topic of linguistic theory and language acquisition for decades.Within linguistic theory,since Bencini and Goldberg's(2000)sentence-sorting experiment,which found a significant role of the argument structure construction in sentence interpretation,some studies have adopted the sentence-sorting paradigm to test the use of constructional knowledge in the second language comprehension.However,two influential factors,verb semantics and L2 proficiency,were not mentioned in previous sentence-sorting studies.In addition,in the field of language acquisition,some studies have explored how verb semantics or language proficiency influences the acquisition of constructions,but what interactional effects existing between these two factors and their co-effects on the comprehension and production of constructions have not been probed into.The current study puts these two influential factors into consideration together to investigate whether the semantic heaviness of verbs(heavy verbs or light verbs)and L2 proficiency(advanced and intermediate)have effects on L2 learners' acquisition of constructions from the perspectives of L2 comprehension and production.Therefore,two experiments will be conducted.A sentence-sorting paradigm(Experiment 1)will be conducted to investigate the effects of the semantic heaviness of verbs and L2 proficiency on the comprehension of constructions and an interactional effect between them.A corpus-based analysis(Experiment 2)will be conducted to confirm the findings of Experiment 1 from natural production,and it will also give further and detailed evidence in investigating the differences between the two different L2 proficiency groups in the use of verb types in the production of constructions.In the sentence-sorting task,a total of 40 non-English majors at the first year of college in School of Physics as the intermediate learners(n=40)and 40 English majors at the first year of graduate school as the advanced learners(n=40)participated in Experiment 1.According to their different English proficiency levels(assessed by the Oxford Quick Placement Test),the participants were divided into an advanced(n=40)and an intermediate(n=40)group.Then,the participants in each group were randomly assigned to heavy(n=20)and light verb(n=20)groups.Each group in the sentence-sorting task was asked to sort 16 English sentences obtained by crossing four verbs with four constructions(transitive,caused-motion,ditransitive and resultative)into four groups based on the overall sentence meaning.However,there were different verbs included in the heavy verb group(throw,kick,cut and drop)and the light verb group(get,take,feen and doak).The results showed that the advanced learners were hardly affected by the semantic heaviness of a verb and their sortings were construction-oriented,while the intermediate learners were heavily affected by verb semantics and they showed a construction-based sentence-sorting tendency in the light verb condition,but not in the heavy verb condition,which indicated that the intermediate learners indeed relied strongly on light verbs to have access to constructional knowledge.In the corpus-based analysis of written texts,there were 60 written L2 samples collected from the Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC).These essays were randomly selected from the advanced(ST6)(n=30)and the intermediate(ST3)(n=30)levels respectively.In addition,30 argumentative essays written by native speakers were collected from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(LOCNEE).First of all,three constructions(ditransitive,resultative and caused-motion)were searched in the sample texts.Then,the semantic heaviness of verbs in each construction was examined.The results revealed that the intermediate learners relied on light verbs to produce constructions more strongly than the advanced learners and native speakers.These findings suggest that L2 proficiency actually modulates the degree to which verb semantic heaviness affects L2 learners' comprehension and production of constructions. |
PDF Full Text Request