A Corpus-based Comparison of the Use of English Resultative Constructions between Chinese English Learners and Native English Speakers

The present study looks into the use of English resultative construction through corpora, including COCA, BNC, and WECCL2.0. Its focus is on the similarities and differences in the use of English resultative construction between Chinese English Learners (CEL) and Native English Speakers (NES). Parameters for evaluation have been set as follows: the animacy of the agent, the aspectuality of the event-argument, and the semantic constraints on the resultative complement. The results show that the agent exerting the force on the patient is mostly animate. In contrast to NES, CEL more frequently use the passive voice with an implied agent. The verbs used by CEL in English resultative construction are sparse. In addition, CEL tend to use fixed phrases and simple constructions and they have acquired basic knowledge about the aspectuality of verbs and boundness of the PP/AP complement of English resultative constructions. (142 words)