Effects of entrenchment and preemption in second language learners’ acceptance of English denominal verbs

Abstract

Entrenchment and preemption are theorized to constrain the novel use of well-attested constructions. This study tested the effects of these two mechanisms in second language (L2) learners’ acceptance of English denominal verbs (DVs). Two groups of Chinese English-L2 speakers (fourth-year English major students and teachers of English) judged the acceptability of English locatum (e.g.,Lucywateredthe rose) and location (e.g.,Lisaboxedthe apples) DVs. Results based on both corpus and introspective frequencies show that the fourth-year learners’ judgments on the acceptability of all DVs were significantly negatively influenced by the frequency of nominal forms of the DVs, suggesting that entrenchment constrains L2 learners from accepting English DVs. Results based on introspective frequency demonstrate that the teachers’ judgments on the acceptability of all DVs were significantly negatively affected by the frequency of alternative verbs, demonstrating that preemption has a role to play in restricting L2 learners’ acceptance of English DVs. Moreover, the obtained DV frequency based on both corpus and learners’ introspection is a significant factor that helps all the participants’ acceptance of the English DVs, suggesting that the more frequently a DV is used, the more likely L2 learners are to judge it as acceptable.

Reduced Competition Effects and Noisier Representations in a Second Language

“…L2 speakers do not appear to take competing alternatives into account in their judgments of unconventional sentences, except at the highest levels of proficiency when their judgments align with those of L1 speakers (cf. Figure 2 in Robenalt & Goldberg, 2016; see also Ambridge & Brandt, 2013;Zhang & Mai, 2018).…”

“…These sentences included three instances each of two English constructions: the double‐object construction and a clausal complement construction. We chose these constructions to provide different target constructions from those used in previous work (Kang, ; Robenalt & Goldberg, ; Zhang & Mai, ). All verbs had relatively high frequency but were unattested in combination with the argument structure used in the experimental stimuli in the 500+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, ).…”

“…This is presumably because frown (not glower) is normally used to express the intended meaning of Example 5a. 3 Zhang and Mai (2018) combined ratings on familiar and novel denominal verbs. 4 In an abstract, Futrell and Gibson (2017) made an independent suggestion that L2 representations are noisier than L1 representations.…”

“…Kang () replicated this finding with a group of Korean learners of English. Likewise, in a study of acceptability judgments made by Chinese learners of English on denominal verbs (e.g., She sweatered the child ), Zhang and Mai () found that only at the highest proficiency levels did competing alternatives appear to be taken into account…”

“…Kang (2017) replicated this finding with a group of Korean learners of English. Likewise, in a study of acceptability judgments made by Chinese learners of English on denominal verbs (e.g., She sweatered the child), Zhang and Mai (2018) found that only at the highest proficiency levels did competing alternatives appear to be taken into account. 3 We can also interpret certain older studies as consistent with the idea that L2 speakers are less likely to consider competing alternatives when judging novel formulations.…”