Inappropriate uses of psychological verbs by Japanese learners of English

• Autores: Misuzu Takami, Naoko Akahori
• Localización: Twenty years of learner corpus research: looking back, moving ahead / Sylviane Granger (ed. lit.), Gaëtanelle Gilquin (ed. lit.), Fanny Meunier (ed. lit.), 2013, ISBN 978-2-87558-199-0, págs. 447-454
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • By 'psychological verbs' here are meant verbs like astonish, comfort, disappoint, excite, interest, please, satisfy, surprise and thrill, which refer to a change in the mental/emotional state of a person. Data from a learner corpus clearly show that there are two types of inappropriate uses of these verbs made by Japanese learners of English. Firstly, verbs are used intransitively rather than transitively, as in 'I surprised at the news' instead of 'I was surprised at the news'. Secondly, Japanese learners of English rarely use the inanimate-subject construction of the type 'The news surprised me'. These two characteristically unnatural features on the part of Japanese learners of English are correlated and are apparently derived from the fact that psychological processes are construed differently by English and Japanese speakers. Considering the construal differences, we compare the sentences involving psychological verbs in the Japanese sub-corpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE-JP) with those from a collection of English essays written by American university students, the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), focusing on the differences in both corpus data in the ratio of psychological verbs used in active and passive voice, and in animate and inanimate subjects followed by these verbs.