Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
The notion of causation, a cognitive presentation of how humans recognize therelation between cause and effect, is a universally existed semantic category inworld’s languages. Just as Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 69) states, causation is “a basichuman concept, which is used by people to express their physical and culturalrealties”. In linguistic structure, causation is expressed as causative construction, andin lexical level it is expressed as causative verbs. Due to the ubiquity of cause andeffect relation in the universe, causation may be a conception with which all peopleshould be confronted.Therefore, the acquisition of causative verbs is of great importance. Englishcausative verb is no exception for Chinese learners. There exists many ways toexpress the causative relationship in English and Chinese as well as many otherlanguages in the world, which mainly include periphrastic causatives and lexicalizedcausatives. In English, periphrastic causative refers to a two-verb structure thatconveys the notion of CAUSE and EFFECT. Typical periphrastic causatives are ledby causative auxiliary verbs such as make, get, cause, force, have, etc. However,lexicalized causative relies on a single verb with an implicit form.There have been an increasing number of studies that investigate causatives dueto the complexity of causation and the diversity of languages in the world.Linguistically speaking, previous researches have used all kinds of approaches todescribe various features of causative verbs, such as generative semantics, typology,and cognitive linguistics, etc., which are surely of fundamental insights and haverevealed various characteristics of causatives. As an important category of Englishverbs, causatives are widely used for daily communication, thus errors may also becommitted. However, the arena that errors of English lexicalized causative verbsmade by Chinese EFL learners, especially by English major students, is not welltouched upon. Naturally, this constitutes an important reason for the current study.
………
1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
This thesis focuses on the investigation of three types of lexicalized causativeverbs (psych, cognitive and involve type) in English major students’ translation and compositions collected in some corpora. By analyzing the examples of lower gradestudents and higher grade students, this study presents a detailed comprehensivedescription of the main problems concerning the usage of lexicalized causative verbs.The objectives of error analysis of lexicalized causative verbs in this study are ofthree folds:1. To find whether there is relationship between the students’ learning level andthe errors.2. To find what errors that English major students make while using lexicalizedcausative verbs during the language production activity.3. To explore the main factors that cause the errors in using lexicalized causativeverbs and infer some useful pedagogical suggestions for future English teaching andlearning.Through the discussion of the above three questions, the present research aims tofill a gap in the literature and have some pedagogical significance to the teaching andlearning, hence facilitate students' understanding of English lexicalized causativeverbs.
……….
Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Definition of Causation, Causative and Causative Construction
According to Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (2004: 362), the definition ofcausation is the causing or producing of an effect, the relation of cause and effect. InComrie and Polinsky ’s term, causation means the cause-and-effect relation whichmay link not only two sub-events or facts but may also link two propositions, one ofwhich is considered as the basis for the other (Comrie and Polinsky, 1993: 167). In aword, causation is a kind of sense and a cause-effect relation.With respect to causative, in most cases, previous studies tend to link it tocausative verb. Saeed’s (1977: 73) states that causatives are constrained to verbs,more specifically, a class of verbs that describe state and change of state or inchoative.Richards et al (1992: 60) directly points out that causative verbs refer to thosedenoting that “someone or something brings about or causes an action or a state”.Goddard (1998: 260) provides a broader definition. He treats causative as “anexpression in which an eventuality (or the caused event) is described as taking placebecause someone does something or because of a precipitating event”. However, hisdiscussion still mainly focuses on the part of causative verbs. In short, the abovedefinitions, to some extent, orientate causatives to causative verbs, whichsemantically denote a cause and is necessarily followed by the resultant event, i.e. astate or another action.
……….
2.2 Classification of Causatives
With respect to the classification of causatives, many scholars have done somedeep study about it. Morphologically speaking, Comrie (1976), points out thatcausatives consist of three major categories: analytic, morphological and lexicalcausatives. While Pylkk nen (1999) holds that actually morphological causatives andlexical causatives belong to the same language phenomenon fundamentally.Pylkk nen’s view will be adopted in this thesis as both morphological causatives andlexical causatives are formed by morphological approach. Therefore, in this paper,morphological causatives and lexical causatives are given the name lexicalizedcausatives. The following is an introduction to these two major types of causatives(analytic causatives and lexicalized causatives) based on form and participant rolesrespectively.
………..
Chapter Three Semantic Analysis of Lexicalized Causative Verbs........24
3.1 Semantic Primitives and Features.......24
3.2 Presence and Absence of Causer ........25
3.3 PROCESS/ RESULT Conflation ........27
3.4 Summary.........29
Chapter Four Research Methodology.......30
4.1 Research Questions.....30
4.2 Method I (Translation)......32
4.2.1 Subject .....32
4.2.2 Translation Test ........32
4.2.3 Data Collection Procedures .........33
4.3 Method II (Corpus Approach) ......34
Chapter Five Data Description and Discussion .........40
5.1 Result I......40
5.2 Result II ....50
Chapter Six Potential Causes of Errors and Pedagogical Suggestions
6.1 Potential Causes of Lexicalized Causative Errors
From the data collected in translation and corpora, we can see that English majorstudents are apt to accept analytic causatives, so they tend to overuse “make + object+ complement” structure. For example:(1) He makes me convinced the difficulties of the job.(2) His skills make him qualified in this job.(3) Her latest movie makes her fans disappointed.(4) This kind of program always make audience satisfied.This result, to some extent, shows English learners’ non-correspondence betweendeep thinking abilities and language expressions. Students may take it for granted thatEnglish writing is simply a process of translating Chinese to English and pay littleattention to the lexicalized phenomenon and the concise way of language expression.The reason for the above phenomenon, as far as I am concerned, is language transfer.Both interlingual and intralingual transfer should be taken into account.
……….
Conclusion
In the previous chapter, we have reviewed and verified the statistical survey dataon lexicalized causative verbs. And based on these analyses, we have probed into thefactors affecting English major learners’ errors while using lexicalized causativeverbs. In this chapter, major findings and limitations of the current study will bepresented. The present study conducts an investigation on the errors of lexicalized causativeverbs in English major students’ translation and writings. The data are all retrievedfrom the translation test and CLEC (St5 and St6) and SWECCL (WECCL) with thehelp of the concordance software. The major findings are summarized as follows.
(1) The overall frequencies of errors made by lower grade students in bothtranslation and corpora are larger than those made by higher grade students. Thisresult shows that learning level is an influencing factor of the errors in usinglexicalized causative verbs. With longer years of learning English and more input oflanguage, higher grade English major students will make less such errors.
(2) The data in this study shows that roughly there are seven types of errors madeby English major students. The overuse of “make+object+complement” structure is acommon phenomenon in the use of the three groups of lexicalized causative verbs.When psych causative verbs are used in statal passive structure (be+V-ed+prep.), theyoften neglect the use of linking verb be, past participle -ed form and preposition ormisuse the preposition.
..........
Reference (omitted)