A Study Of The Acquisition Errors Of Middle Construction By Chinese English Majors

Middle construction is a special construction with active syntactic form and passive semantic meaning.English middle construction(EMC)is quite different from its corresponding active and passive structures from perspectives of syntactic and semantic features,which leads to great difficulties for Chinese EFL learners in acquiring EMC.Previous studies are generally based on the framework of a single theory and study on several typical middle verbs which lack the support of a large corpus.This study applies combined theoretical frameworks of Interface Hypothesis and Construction Grammar to study on 171 possible middle verbs in order to explore Chinese English major undergraduates’ acquisition of EMC and analyze the causes of usage errors.The research focuses on the following three questions:(1)What are the differences for Chinese English major undergraduates in the acquisition of typical and atypical English middle constructions?(2)What are the main errors for Chinese English major undergraduates in using typical and atypical English middle constructions?(3)What are the main causes of these errors from perspectives of Construction Grammar and Interface Hypothesis?In order to answer the above questions,this study uses two sub-corpora ST5 and ST6 from CLEC to testify 171 middle verbs according to Simargool’ research by means of Ant Conc 3.5.8 and conducts a questionnaire with 60 English major undergraduates,and then makes the follow-up interview with 10 students.Finally,the data collected are analyzed by SPSS 24.0.The findings show that:(1)Although there is no significant difference of acquisition between typical and atypical EMC by Chinese English majors in the overall degree,the acquisition of typical EMC is relatively better.Nevertheless,there are distinct differences between typical and atypical EMC in the aspects of the types of subjects and verbs and the selection of tense and modifiers;(2)The main errors made by Chinese English majors in the acquisition of typical and atypical middle constructions include subject predicate agreement,hidden agent,misuse of middle verbs and adverbs,etc.Except for the students’ careless mistakes,the other errors can be summarized from three aspects: the wrong judgement of the relationship between agent and patient,misuse and misunderstanding of middle verbs and the misuse of adverbs.Because of the vague understanding of the relationship between the verb and the subject in the construction,most students make mistakes in the verb,and it also leads to the errors of the subject;(3)The main causes for these errors are students’ insufficient understanding of construction and syntactic-semantic,syntactic-pragmatic mismatches on the interfaces.Due to the insufficient understanding of the middle construction,students transfer their mother tongue to the second language on the basis of semantic similarity,but neglect the constructional,pragmatic and contextual difference.In sense of the cognitive mechanism of EMC,English is a hypotactic language which is used to limit the modal features and semantic features of sentences through a set of strict rules so English needs construction coercion through metonymy to make sure each component can enter the construction;while Chinese is a paratactic language which has relatively flexible syntactic rules and is good at expressing modality and features with additional constituents and markers.This is the reason that leads to the syntax-semantics and syntax-pragmatics mismatches on the interfaces when learners use English to express the same semantic meanings of Chinese sentences.In addition,the above findings provide some implications for the teaching of EMC: pay more attention to the input of English middle sentences and promote learners’ inductive ability;pay more attention in teaching by comparing the differences between EMC and Chinese middle construction(CMC);teaching EMC with specific contexts to develop students’ pragmatic skills.