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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background and Motivation of the Study
English prepositions (e.g. in, on, across) are lexical items used preceding nouns, pronouns and gerunds, or after verbs, to show the relationship between them and words surrounding it (Richards, Platt, & Platt, 1992; Oxford English Dictionary, 2009). They are called differently according to their function in the context being used.
For example, they are called ―particles‖ when they occur as an element in phrasal verbs, or verb-particle construction (e.g. Morgan, 1997; Darwin & Gray, 1999; Dirven, 2001). They are also called ―adverbial particles‖ (Gardner & Davies, 2007), ―spatial particles‖ (Tyler & Evans, 2003; Ho, 2007) and ―spatial prepositions‖ (Goddard, 2002;
Van der Gucht, Willems & De cuypere, 2007) in different studies. As the current study focuses on the meaning of prepositions instead of their grammatical structure, the term ―preposition‖ is used to refer to any positions of this lexical item.
Each preposition carries a number of meanings which are usually listed as lexical entry of the dictionary. For instance, on Merriam-Webster Learner‘s Online
Dictionary, the entry for in contains 21 meanings and on contains 32 meanings, which may even differ from dictionary to dictionary. When learners learn the meanings of preposition, they may refer to the entry listed on the dictionary whenever they
encounter meanings unclear in context. Moreover, the meanings may cause confusion in use for English learners, and this confusion mainly comes from the complexity of the meaning and usage of prepositions (e.g. Armstrong, 2004; Wierzbicka, 1993), which may be clearly known by native speakers of English but not by nonnative
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國立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
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speakers, including language teachers. This complexity may also cause difficulty in comprehension as some of their senses are obscure from the context, as in (1.1).
(1.1) ?Because many times I thought I could not to get the goal and I would give in before I try. (NCCU_E030007)
According to the context given, it seems confusing whether what the writer intended to say was give in or give up. Moreover, it is not obvious to specify the meaning of in and the verb-particle expression in this case unless learners have learned the particular verb-particle construction before.
Due to the semantic complexity of prepositions, efforts have been devoted to the analysis of their meanings. Researchers attempt to explain the meanings through a more systematic way under the framework of image-schema theory (Lakoff, 1987;
Kreitzer, 1997; Tyler & Evans, 2001, or see Ungerer & Schmid, 2002), in which the concept of trajector (or figure) and landmark (or ground) is adopted to explicate the meanings. The former one refers to the moving entity while the latter is where this entity moves toward or locates. The interaction between them may help greatly in explaining the various meanings each preposition contains. Some other studies have identified prepositions as polysemous items and have presented semantic networks based on their own categorization (Dirven, 1993; Evans & Tyler, 2004; Goddard, 2002; Taylor, 1993). In addition, many studies have probed into particles or adverbs in the construction of phrasal verbs, especially the seemingly random combination of the verb and the particle (e.g. Armstrong, 2004; Darwin and Gray, 1999; Gardner and Davies 2007; Machonis, 2008; Side, 1990; Villavicencio, 2005). These studies show that the combination of phrasal verbs is not unsystematic, as the meaning of
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國立 政 治 大 學
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verb-particle constructions could be systematically related to the meaning of verbs and particles. Rudzka-Ostyn (2003) clarifies particles in phrasal verbs and compounds using the cognitive approach, in which he claims that to understand a phrasal verb, it not only involves comprehending how the verbs of physical or spatial motion could be used for abstract motion, but also the meanings of particles which denote various metaphorical meanings. The complexity of how the senses of particles help explicate the meanings and combinations of phrasal verb has also motivated investigations into avoidance strategy used by language learners in their language production. Avoidance strategy usually occurs when the language structure or usage seems unfamiliar to the learner, and learners might underproduce them to lower their mistakes (Odlin, 1989).
Previous studies have proposed different causes for this avoidance phenomena, including L1-L2 differences (e.g. the structural differences between learners‘ native language and target language), L1-L2 similarity (e.g. L2 word combinations that have equivalents in L1 with identical or specific meaning), and L2 complexity (e.g. the literal and figurative semantic differences that exist in the same structure) (Dagut &
Laufer, 1985; Hulstijn & Marchena, 1989; Laufer & Eliasson, 1993; Liao & Fukuya, 2004). For example, Dagut and Laufer found that the structural differences between Hebrew and English may have negative influence on Hebrew learners producing English phrasal verbs. They have addressed different levels of avoidance by language learners varying in different language systems. Though these studies suggested how the meanings of particle play a role in the comprehension of the whole verb-particle construction, they did not specify how particles are chosen for a particular
combination. For example, as out and up can both denote the sense of ―completion‖
(c.f. Neagu, 2007), we say fill out instead of fill up. In other words, the choice of when to use a particle in a particular linguistic context is still left unresolved, and this
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indeterminancy may cause difficulty for learners to correctly use them in appropriate linguistic contexts.
Previous research has attempted to probe into learners‘ performance on using and choosing prepositions via different methods. They investigated into learners‘
difficulty in using English prepositions through a particular form of diagnostic tests, (e.g. multiple-choice questions in Cheng (2006) and Khampang (1974); corpus-based analysis in Chung & Tseng (2011)), grammaticality judgment test (Tang, 2009), translation or rephrase task (Boers & Demecheller, 1998), and some instructional approaches from various perspectives, including prototype semantics (Lindstromberg, 1996), cognitive semantic approach (Condon, 2008; Hsu, 2005; Morimoto & Loewen, 2007), and polysemous network (Ho, 2007). These studies revealed learners‘
difficulty in using English prepositions and suggested that certain approach may indeed facilitate the learning of them. However, though they provide implications for the improvement in teaching, they are not based on a large quantity of language data produced by language learners under a systematic analysis procedure, which may reflect learners‘ knowledge of the sense and usage of prepositions. De Vega et al.
(2002) proposed an Integration Hypothesis which claimed that a multiple-constraint process should be activated to comprehend locative sentences with the sensory-motor features of the objects retrieved and fitted into a simulation that facilitates
comprehension. A research method analyzing semantic features of the preceding and following nouns was adopted and the result was used to predict the semantic profiles of the selected prepositions. Inspired by this approach, the present study intends to analyze the semantic meanings of prepositions through the semantic feature analysis.
Two of the most frequently used prepositions, in and on, will be analyzed and compared.
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Based on the research purposes of the study, the research questions will be addressed as the following:
(1) How do corpora help explicate the senses of the prepositions in and on through semantic feature analysis?
(2) Is there any significant difference in learners‘ understanding of prepositions from that of the native speakers‘ in terms of the semantic meanings the prepositions denote?