The purpose of the study was to examine the acquisition of English dative verb constructions among Korean EFL learners. Some dative verbs such as 'give', 'sell' and 'buy' typically alternate (alternating dative verb, AD) and make two types of structur...
The purpose of the study was to examine the acquisition of English dative verb constructions among Korean EFL learners. Some dative verbs such as 'give', 'sell' and 'buy' typically alternate (alternating dative verb, AD) and make two types of structures. One construction is the prepositional dative (PD), where the recipient or benefactive is realized as a prepositional phrase and the other is the double object dative (DOD). However, the double object form is not allowed in the construction of non-alternating dative verbs (NAD) such as 'donate', 'explain', and 'construct'. The verb 'donate', like 'give', takes a theme and a recipient argument, and occurs in the PD form, but it has no double object equivalent. Dative alternation appears differently depending on the semantic property of a dative verb. Due to the difference in dative alternation between Korean and English, it is common for Korean learners to have difficulty acquiring English dative verb constructions, while native English speakers almost perfectly acquire dative alternations by the age of 5 (Campbell & Tomasello, 2001).
On the basis of the limitations found in the previous studies, the author examined Korean students' acquisition of English dative alternation through comprehension and production tasks. A group of one hundred first-year high school students in Gyeonggi Province, composed of 48 male and 52 female students, participated in the study. Participating students were divided into two groups, a high ranking group and a low ranking group, based on the pre-test on English proficiency. Both groups carried out a sentence making task and a sentence grammaticality judgment task.
The followings are the result of this study.
First, most students resulted in higher scores in a comprehension task than in a production task regardless of their English proficiency level, indicating they have implicit knowledge on dative verb constructions. Moreover, in both comprehension and production tasks, both groups showed a higher score when using an AD than a NAD verb. The result is believed to be due to the difference in the vocabulary difficulty levels between the AD and NAD verbs. The constructions of AD verbs are acquired earlier than those of NAD verb because the AD verbs generally have a lower level of difficulty and are typically learned in early stages of learning English.
Second, while most students received a high score in the comprehension task of AD constructions, most students produced dative verbs which take recipient argument earlier than dative verbs which take benefactive argument in the production task. This results show the discrepancy between students' knowledge and performance. In the production of DOD, students showed the same results as in the study of Oh (2006), which supports the structural transfer hypothesis.
Third, 87 students out of 100 students preferred using PD to DOD. In a production task, students tended to write the PD constructions first and write the DOD constructions later. This result is the same as the study of Mazurkewich (1984), in which students use more PD than DOD constructions in the acceptability judgment task. The study concluded that students used more unmarked PD than marked DOD constructions when they did not have sufficient knowledge to distinguish the sematic properties of each verb.
Fourth, most students almost acquired the verb 'pass', which is the verb that inherently signify acts of giving, while the verb 'buy' or 'find' (verbs of obtaining) were used less than 'pass' in the production of DOD constructions. This shows that the acquisition of dative constructions differs according to the semantic property of a dative verb.
There are a number of educational implications and recommendations for follow-up studies.
First, students should be educated on semantic properties as well as syntactic properties of dative constructions with abundant linguistic input. Second, it is desirable for teachers to use an explicit teaching method, which provides not only positive evidences but also negative evidences for the recognition of morphological and syntactic features of English dative verbs. Finally, in order to enhance students' implicit knowledge on dative verbs, teachers are recommended to utilize a communicative learning method, which provides opportunities for students to use dative verbs in a meaningful context.
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