| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 97 === English prepositions, though a very small number compared with the vast number of nouns, adjectives and verbs which English has (Harper-Collins Publisher, 1993), represent an important and frequently used category in English (Daud & Abusa, 1999; Littlefield, 2006). Many studies have shown that EFL learners with Chinese background encounter great difficulty in learning prepositional use in such verbal phrases as simple verb-preposition combination, phrasal verbs, and prepositional verbs (Yang, Hsu, & Lin, 2005; Keskin, 2004; Ma, 2007; Qiu, 2008, among others). A review of what has been done in the past with regard to the difficulty in prepositional use reveals that analyses of previous studies were limited to the discipline of semantics, cognition, and cognitive semantics, but syntactic exploration is hardly seen. The purpose of this study is to bridge the gap by offering an exploration of what might cause difficulty in prepositional use by EFL learners with Chinese background from the syntactic perspective through error analysis.
The study used Littlefield’s (2006) Prepositional Domain as syntactic classification of English prepositions. In the domain are four P-forms (i.e. prepositional forms, or also called prepositional elements) including prepositional adverbs, particles, semi-lexical prepositions, and functional prepositions. Two stages of the research design were involved. Stage one aims to help the researcher identify four unclear prepositional elements of on in some verbal phrases (i.e. phrasal and non-phrasal verbs) from three versions of senior high English textbooks. The method was Internalized Approach, which elicited grammaticality judgment from native speakers of English. This grammaticality test was generated based on four transformations associating with four syntactic properties of the P-forms. Native speakers’ intuition about the transformational grammaticality was expected to help with the identification of the P-forms. Data collected by means of the method in stage one has the subsidiary function of developing the materials for the primary data collection in stage two. The second stage aims to elicit 154 senior high school third graders’ performance on prepositions by means of grammaticality judgment and a gap-filling test. The student participants were found to make most errors of substitution. Also, the lexical feature (i.e. contributing to semantic content) carried by P-forms played a crucial role of causing difficulty in using prepositions. The functional feature (i.e. linking through case assignment) was irrelevant in this respect. Possible explanation of the results was given through the framework of Hawkins’ (2001) Modulated Structure Building. The fact that the lexical feature is a crucial factor conforms to Hawkins’ claim about L2 acquisition process where learners start their L2 mental grammar with lexical projections. As to the functional feature, it is related to the AGRP. Suppose Chinese does not have AGRP, then the binary vales of the functional feature does not have a chance to come into play. If Chinese has AGRP, transferring AGRP from Chinese to English is problematic to a great extent.
Pedagogical implication reminds English teachers not over-rely on the role of the lexical feature playing in the teaching and learning of prepositions at the expense of the functional feature.
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