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Acquisition of the Prototypical and Non-prototypical Meanings of over by Chinese EFL Learners: Evidence from a Verb Production Task

Author(s)

Jiang Jun

Affiliation(s)

Hunan City University, Yiyang, Hunan, China

Abstract

Construction prototypicality has long attracted scholarly attention, yet research on the acquisition of such prototypicality remains limited. This study investigates the prototypicality of the senses of over within the V(n) over XXX construction. A verb production task was used to elicit verb production from participants, and qualitative analysis was performed to explore how the semantic prototypicality of over affects verb production. The experimental results show that L2 learners’ mental representations of construction prototypicality diverge from those of native speakers. For both high- and intermediate-proficiency Chinese EFL learners, the acquisition of over’s prototypical senses lags behind that of some of its non-prototypical senses; While there was no significant difference between the two groups in acquiring the prototypical sense, their acquisition of non-prototypical senses was broadly similar; nevertheless, the advanced learners exhibited more fine-grained acquisition than the intermediate learners.

Keywords

Prototypicality Hypothesis, Verb Production Task

References

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