The Effect Of Semantic Constraints And Input Frequency Upon L2 Acquisition Of English Conative Construction By Chinese Learners Of English

Semantic constraint and input frequency are two important factors affecting the acquisition of L2 verb argument constructions,but researchers have not reached a consensus on their specific roles.This thesis regards the English conative construction,which is less researched at home and abroad,as the target construction.This study aims to investigate the effects of semantic constraint and input frequency upon L2 acquisition of English conative construction by Chinese learners of English at different levels.The thesis attempted to answer the following two questions: 1)What effects do semantic constraints have on L2 acquisition of English conative construction by Chinese learners of English?2)What effects does input frequency have on L2 acquisition of English conative construction by Chinese learners of English? Sixty Chinese English learners participated in this research and were divided into two groups according to their English proficiency.The high-level group included 30 participants who have passed TEM-4,and the low-level group included 30 high school freshmen.Through corpora investigation and experimental research,such as verbal fluency task,interpretation test as well as grammaticality judgment task to solve research questions.The results are as follows: 1)In terms of the semantic constraint,the two groups were reluctant to accept illicit conative construction and the high-level L2 learners were sensitive to the semantic constraint of English conative construction and were aware of verbs that only formed with the transferred force constraint were more incompatible with conative construction than verbs that only formed with the no completely change of state constraint.2)With regard to the input frequency,the two groups had different performance on two types of conative construction containing high-frequency and low-frequency words.However,the study also found that the acquisition of conative construction by high-level L2 learners was not only affected by input frequency,but also by construction transference.The results suggest that semantic constraint and input frequency have significant effects on the acquisition of conative construction by Chinese learners of English at different levels,which lends support to the semantic verb class hypothesis and the usage-based language acquisition theory.In the process of second language teaching,teachers should pay full attention to the role of semantic constraint and input frequency,so as to promote learners to master the acquisition of verb argument constructions including conative construction.