Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
English resultative construction has attracted much attention from differentlinguistic schools. Specifically, structuralist emphasizes the characteristics of smalllinguistic units and linguistic expression, and the sequence of each linguistic unit inthe sentence. Linguists of transformational approach such as Chomsky (1957)emphasize the importance of verb in the sentence. However, linguists of cognitiveapproach such as Goldberg (1995), Langacker (1991), etc. think that construction ispairings of form and meaning. Constructions carry meaning, but verb can notdetermine the participants of the sentence. Sentence is formed through the interactionbetween construction and verb and construction’s coercion on verb. Thus based on thetheory of cognitive approach, which is construction grammar, it is significant to makeexplorations on Chinese college students’ acquisition of English resultativeconstruction.
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1.2 Research Objective
English resultative construction as one of the English argument structures inconstruction grammar has been regarded as a complex one. Therefore, the actualapplication of this construction has revealed the potential problem existing in Chinesecollege students’ acquisition. In order to analyze the Chinese college students’acquisition of English resultative construction, two research questions are raised inthis study, which are:
1. What type of English resultative construction do Chinese college students acquirebest and which type do they acquire worst?
2. What are the factors that affect Chinese students’ acquisition of English resultativeconstructions?
Based on the analysis of the two research questions, the thesis tries to supply theimplications for English teaching and learning of English resultative construction.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Construction
As we know, construction is the central place in cognitive grammar. In recentyears, researchers have showed great interest in the study of construction. So a varietyof interpretations of the notion of construction have been proposed from differentperspectives.In construction grammar, constructions consist of pairings of form and meaningwhich are partially arbitrary. Constructions are seen as the basic units of language.According to Langacker (1999), constructions are fundamentally symbolic units. Inconstruction grammar, construction is believed to exist if some of its properties cannot be predicted from the existing constructions in the grammar. Goldberg (1995)raises the definition of construction that is widely accepted as quoted in the following;C is a CONSTRUCTION iff C is a form-meaning pair such that someaspect of Fi or some aspect of Si is not strictly predictable from C’s componentparts or from other previously established constructions. (Goldberg 1995: 4)According to Goldberg, if the form and meaning of the linguistic expressioncannot be predicted from the previous constructions existing in the grammar, thislinguistic pattern is taken as the construction. Constructions in this sense can bemorphemes, words, idioms, partially lexically filled and fully abstract phrasal patterns(Goldberg, 2017).
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