TITLE:
The Main Determinant of English Sentences Comprehension by Chinese EFL Learners: The Verb or the Construction?
AUTHORS:
Zuxian Cao, Changyin Zhou
KEYWORDS:
Self-Paced Reading, Verbs, Constructions, Chinese EFL Learners, English Resultatives, Surface Structure, Deep Structure
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.4 No.2,
June
16,
2014
ABSTRACT: Using the
self-paced reading, this paper investigated the role of verbs or constructions
when Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners try to understand an
English sentence. Previous researches on the main determinant in English
sentences comprehension had two different views.Healy and Miller (1970)held that the verb
is the main determinant of sentence meaning, whileBencini and Goldberg (2000)held that the
construction is directly associated with sentence meaning. However, studies
from English as a second language may provide a clue of the main determinant of
English sentence meaning. The paper classified English resultatives into four
types: the Subcategorized Object Resultative, the Non-subcategorized Object
Resultative, the Fake Reflexive Resultative and the No Object Resultative. The
paper investigated high-level Chinese English learners’ understanding of the English
resultative constructions which have the same surface structure but different
deep structures (the first three types). The result showed that the acquisition
of subcategorized object resultatives is better than non-subcategorized object
resultatives. Therefore, this paper argues that although the construction has
a suppressing impact on the verb, the basic determinant of English sentences
comprehension by Chinese EFL learners is the verb.