Frequency effects in the L2 acquisition of the catenative verb construction – evidence from experimental and corpus data

Author:

Azazil Lina1

Affiliation:

1. English Linguistics , Trier University , Universitätsring 15 , Trier 54296 , Germany

Abstract

Abstract This paper investigates frequency effects in the L2 acquisition of the catenative verb construction by German learners of English from a usage-based perspective by presenting findings from two experimental studies and a complementary corpus study. It was examined if and to what extent the frequency of the verb in the catenative verb construction affects the choice of the target-like complement type and if the catenative verb construction with a to-infinitive complement, which is highly frequent in English, is more accurately acquired and entrenched than the less frequent variant with an -ing complement. In all three studies, the more frequent construction with a to-infinitive yielded higher numbers of target-like complement choices. Furthermore, it was shown that the verb’s faithfulness to the construction made a significant prediction of a target-like complement preference. It is argued that a higher faithfulness promotes a target-like entrenchment of the construction and motivates a taxonomic generalisation across related exemplars. Furthermore, the results provide support for the idea that the mental representation of language is comprised of item-specific as well as more abstract schema knowledge, where frequency determines the specificity with which the construction is entrenched.

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Subject

Linguistics and Language,Developmental and Educational Psychology,Language and Linguistics

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