Caused-motion Constructions in Learner English Corpora: from Observation to Experimentation

• Autor(a) principal: Rosa, Rodrigo Garcia
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8147/tde-21092020-174719/
• topic: Caused motions; CMCs; Construction Grammar; Corpus de aprendizes; Data elicitation; EFL; EFL; Elicitação de dados; Gramática de Construções; Learner corpus

This dissertation investigates the production and comprehension of English caused-motion constructions by EFL learners with four Romance language backgrounds, namely, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian. In order to study the phenomena, the research proposes a methodological approach at the interface between observational (corpus linguistics methods) and experimental studies (data elicitation approaches) for the selection, compilation and extraction of the data. From the theoretical perspective of Cognitive Construction Grammar (GOLDBERG, 1995; 2006), this study identifies four constructional domains for caused motions, against which the learner data are analyzed: (1) literal caused motions with instantiating verbs (eg. put the toys into the box); (2) figurative caused motions with instantiating verbs (eg. get yourself in trouble); (3) literal caused motions with modifying verbs (eg. they laughed him out of the office); and (4) figurative caused motions with modifying verbs (eg. She talked me into stupor). The observational analysis made use of the EFCamDAT corpus and targeted the languages mentioned at four levels of proficiency, from A2 to C1 levels in the CEFR. On the experimental side, the study devised and applied an acceptability judgment task with 120 EFL Brazilian learners at two levels of proficiency: B2 and C1. The study aimed at investigating the development of caused motions by testing two aspects and their effect on the use and comprehension of the structure: (1) level of proficiency and (2) the degree of linguistic complexity of the structures in question. The results of both the observational and experimental studies showed that proficiency does affect learners\' performance with caused motions, much more significantly than typological differences (for that we used a control group of German learners). On the matter of linguistic complexity, the results showed that learners have a descending level of use and recognition of caused motions that is proportional with the ascending level of semantic complexity of the structures. Also, as advocated by Ellis (2013), Hampe (2010) and Xia (2017), low-level constructions (i.e., phraseologisms) did seem to play a role in determining some uses of caused motions, especially those of the last domain (figurative caused motions with modifying verbs).