中國高級英語學習者對反義關(guān)系的習得

1、2021/4/21中國高級英語學習者對反義關(guān)系中國高級英語學習者對反義關(guān)系的習得的習得 山東大學外國語學院 王勇2021/4/22摘要摘要根據(jù)國外研究者對反義關(guān)系典型性的研究，本文作者設計了一套76對反義詞對，對山東某大學英語專業(yè)三年級學生和美國某高校的本族語者進行了反義關(guān)系典型性判斷的測試，并將測試結(jié)果進行對比，以期找出中國高級英語學習者在反義關(guān)系習得方面的規(guī)律，并對結(jié)果做出解釋。實驗結(jié)果表明，中國高級英語學習者在部分反義詞對的判斷上與英語本族語者有著顯著差異，這些顯著差異在典型性反義詞和一般性反義詞中均有反映，其原因較為復雜，包括但不限于反義詞對的共現(xiàn)頻率、語義范圍以及概念對立性；其中反義

2、詞對的共現(xiàn)頻率及MI值對于中國高級英語學習者及英語本族語者的反義詞對典型性判斷測試具有最強烈的影響。同時，對某些反義詞對進行了案例研究，深入探討了上述因素對于反義詞對典型性判斷的影響。2021/4/23Canonicity of antonymous Canonicity of antonymous pairspairs反義詞對的典型性反義詞對的典型性 “Language users can intuitively sort good (or prototypical) antonyms from not-so-good ones and downright bad ones” (Murphy

3、, 2003: 11). This is often referred to as the clang phenomenon a term used to describe the reaction to those pairs that intuitively strike the hearer as being good opposites (Charles and Miller, 1989; Muehleisen, 1997). The following working definition of canonical antonyms is adopted in this thesis

4、:2021/4/24Canonicity of antonymous Canonicity of antonymous pairspairs反義詞對的典型性反義詞對的典型性Canonical antonyms are pairs of words in binary semantic opposition associated by convention as well as by semantic relatedness (e.g. wide/narrow). The notion of canonical antonymy is different from semantic opposi

5、tion in which the meanings are incompatible, but the words are not necessarily conventionally paired (e.g. cold/scorching, calm/nervous).2021/4/25antonymous pairs反義詞對的選擇 The antonymous pairs used in the canonicity judgment task are mainly taken from two sources: that of Deese (1964) and Sabourin (19

6、98). Deese (1964: 347-57) picked from the data from the psycholinguistic elicitation tests forty word pairs which he considered among the most important in English. Justeson and Katz used these antonyms in their research and regarded them as “historically important” (1991: 142). However, since Deese

7、s work was conducted before access to corpora was possible, it was based entirely on the results of word association tests.2021/4/26 Deese chose 278 adjectives and used them to elicit response from 100 informants. When a pair of contrast words successfully elicited one another more than any other wo

8、rd, they were added to the list of antonymous pairs, which ultimately numbered forty.2021/4/272021/4/28Antonym canonicity judgment test反義詞對典型性測試Antonymous pairs listAntonymous pairs listTo what extent can the following word pairs be regarded as “perfect” antonyms? Please rate them according to your

9、intuition, circling a number on the 10-point scale following each pair. (10 stands for perfect antonym, 1 means not antonym at all. For example, 1087654321).active passive10987654321 active inactive10987654321agitated quiet10987654321agitated calm10987654321alive inanimate10987654321alive dead109876

10、54321bad good10987654321bad evil10987654321big small10987654321big little109876543212021/4/29The difference between NSs and NNSs The difference between NSs and NNSs results of judgments of the canonicity of results of judgments of the canonicity of the antonymous pairsthe antonymous pairs學習者與本族語者在反義

11、詞對典型性判斷測試中的差異學習者與本族語者在反義詞對典型性判斷測試中的差異 In order to examine any possible difference between NSs and NNSs results of judgments of the canonicity of the antonymous pairs, a One-way ANOVA is adopted to achieve this end. As can be seen from the table in Appendix VIII, among the 76 antonymous pairs, 28 of

12、them demonstrate significant difference between NSs and NNSs results, accounting for 37% of the whole set of antonymous pairs.2021/4/210學習者與本族語者在反義詞對典型學習者與本族語者在反義詞對典型性判斷測試中差異顯著的詞對性判斷測試中差異顯著的詞對 These pairs are: agitated / quiet, alive / dead, bad / good, bad / evil, big / small, big / little, expensi

13、ve / cheap, expensive / inexpensive, good / bad, good / evil, illegal / legitimate, permanent / transient, poor / affluent, right / incorrect, safe / dangerous, simple / complicated, simple / sophisticated, bend / stretch, lose / win, addition / subtraction, fact / fiction, fact / rumor, failure / s

14、uccess, generosity / greed, generosity / miserliness, guilt / punishment, strength / weakness, strength / vulnerability.2021/4/211Possible factors influencing the scores Possible factors influencing the scores on antonym canonicity judgment teston antonym canonicity judgment test影響反義詞對典型性判斷測試分數(shù)的因素影響

15、反義詞對典型性判斷測試分數(shù)的因素 Is there any relation between the scores on the judgment of canonicity of antonymous pairs on the one hand, and MI score, the frequency of stimulus word (first member of the antonymous pairs) in the corpus, the frequency of response word (second member of the antonymous pairs) in th

16、e corpus, or the frequency of co-occurrence of the two members in the antonymous pairs within a certain span in the corpus, on the other hand?2021/4/212 In order to answer this question, a bivariate Correlations Test is performed to see whether there is any relation. As can be seen from the above tw

17、o tables, both NSs and NNSs judgment scores are significantly correlated with the co-occurrence frequency of the two members of the antonymous pairs (all ps .01), but not significantly correlated with other factors mentioned earlier.2021/4/213 That attests the assumption that native speakers have an

18、 intuition about the co-occurrence of the canonical antonymous pairs. And the result of the NNSs judgment scores also demonstrate the tendency of advanced Chinese EFL learners to become familiar with this kind of information due to the intensive teaching and extensive reading requested by English ma

19、jors.2021/4/214The relation between NNSs discrepancy from NSs antonym canonicity The relation between NNSs discrepancy from NSs antonym canonicity judgment scores and NNSs overall L2 proficiency and specific judgment scores and NNSs overall L2 proficiency and specific lexical proficiencylexical prof

20、iciency學習者與本族語者在反義詞對典型性判斷測試中的分數(shù)差異與二語水平學習者與本族語者在反義詞對典型性判斷測試中的分數(shù)差異與二語水平以及詞匯水平的關(guān)系以及詞匯水平的關(guān)系From above discussion, we know that NNSs performance on antonym canonicity judgment test deviates from that of NSs. We wonder if we can use this discrepancy as an indicator of NNS subjects overall L2 proficiency a

21、nd specific lexical proficiency. In order to do that, we calculate the discrepancy using the following formula: discrepancy = (SNNSi-SNSmeani)2in which SNNSi means the score of an NNS individual on ith antonymous pair (i ranges from 1 to 76), while SNSmeani is the mean score of NS on ith antonymous

22、pair. By (SNNSi-SNSmean)2 we get the square of the difference between NNS individuals score on ith antonymous pair and that of NNSs mean score on this pair. After we get the sum of all the 76 pairs square differences, we may get NNS individuals discrepancy by deriving the square root of this sum. 20

23、21/4/215 After we get each NNS individuals discrepancy score, we use SPSS to detect if it is correlation with his/her general linguistic proficiency (as indicated by TEM4 score) or with his/her specific lexical proficiency (as indicated by the several lexical mentioned above). Table 5.18 shows the r

24、esults of correlation test. 2021/4/216Discrepancy vs. TEM4 From the above table, we can see that NNS individuals discrepancy score has a negative correlation with their TEM4 scores (r = -.225, p = .024). This result conforms to our expectation; it means the less the discrepancy score, the closer the

25、 NNS individuals performance with that of NSs, the higher the NNS individuals performance on general linguistic proficiency. However, their discrepancy scores show no relationship with their performance on synonym differentiation test (score20) and specific lexical test, i.e., Word Associates Test (

26、WAT), Productive Levels Test (PLT), and Levels Test of Vocabulary Recognition (LTV-R).2021/4/217 The reason might be that antonymy is indeed a complicated construct and thus need further investigation before we can tease out its nature. Besides this, the NNS individuals discrepancy scores also have

27、a negative correlation with their self-rating scores on their writing ability (r = -.206, p = .031). This is also reasonable, because writing could be considered the most complicated process among the four linguistic skills, and acquisition of antonymy will occur at an advanced stage of lexical comp

28、etence.2021/4/218An extension of the present An extension of the present studystudy In order to picture the route followed by advanced Chinese EFL learners when acquiring the L2 lexical semantic relations, the synonym differentiation test and the antonym canonicity judgment test were also administer

29、ed to a group of freshmen of English major. For fear that the unfamiliar word would frustrate their understanding of the sentence meaning and influence their judgment, the subjects are required to mark them. The results showed that, the synonym differentiation test has too many unfamiliar words for

30、a large part of the subjects. Therefore, the test results were set aside.2021/4/219 The results of the antonym canonicity judgment test nonetheless could serve the purpose, since we may delete antonymous pairs with unfamiliar words marked. The procedures are as follows: first, the results are typed

31、into the dataset; then, a simple count of the marked words is carried out; third, the results with marking are treated as missing value, and if these marked results were more than 15% of the number of the subjects (that is, it is higher than 20), then the concerned antonymous pairs will be deleted;

32、only the antonymous pairs with less than 15% markings are reserved for further consideration. We can follow the rule of thumb to treat them as missing value and thus replace them with series mean of the concerned item.2021/4/220 A One-Way ANOVA is administered to show whether there is any significan

33、t difference between the results by freshmen Chinese English majors, junior Chinese English majors, and native speakers (for significant results, see Appendix VII). At the same time, the means plots of the One-Way ANOVA procedure are examined in order to find any significant results. On examining th

34、e results, we find an interesting phenomenon: to the native speakers, the negative prefix is a strong indicator of antonymous status. If the antonymous pairs consist of one word and another word with a negative prefix, the native speakers usually give higher marks to them than Chinese EFL learners.2

35、021/4/221Negative Prefix Hypothesis反義前綴假設 In the remaining antonymous list, there are 9 sets of such pairs: active-inactive, correct-incorrect, expensive-inexpensive, happy-unhappy, healthy-unhealthy, illegal-legal, married-unmarried, safe-unsafe, and disprove-prove. Except for happy-unhappy, the ot

36、her 8 sets are invariably shows a sharp rise on the native speakers judgment scores. We could cautiously call this phenomenon as Negative Prefix Hypothesis: native speakers of English rely heavily on negative prefix to judge the antonymous status of a word pairs in a context-free setting. We could i

37、n the future include more such pairs in our test and extend this test to EFL learners with other language background to see its reliability.2021/4/222 In order to look at the comparison between each groups of subjects to make a more detailed study of the antonymous pairs, an Independent-Samples t te

38、st is administered (1) between freshmen Chinese English majors and junior Chinese English majors, (2) between freshmen Chinese English majors and native speakers, and (3) between junior Chinese English majors and native speakers. The results show that: 2021/4/223 The scores on 11 antonymous pairs ar

39、e significantly different between freshmen Chinese English majors and junior Chinese English majors. These pairs include bad-evil, difficult-simple, false-real, good-evil, poor-rich, poor-affluent, confirm-deny, fail-fulfill, addition-reduction, failure-achievement, and generosity-greed. There are s

40、till two antonymous pairs with a marginally significant difference between the above two groups. They are right-incorrect and shorten-lengthen. 2021/4/224 The scores on 22 antonymous pairs are significantly different between freshmen Chinese English majors and native speakers. These pairs include al

41、ive-dead, bad-good, big-little, correct-incorrect, difficult-simple, expensive-cheap, expensive-inexpensive, good-bad, good-evil, illegal-legitimate, right-wrong, right-incorrect, begin-end, bend-stretch, confirm-deny, fail-fulfill, lose-win, shorten-lengthen, fact-fiction, failure-achievement, gene

42、rosity-greed, and guilt-punishment. There are still 6 antonymous pairs with a marginally significant difference between the above two groups. They are active-inactive, big-small, correct-wrong, married-single, simple-complicated, and lower-raise. 2021/4/225 The scores on 20 antonymous pairs are sign

43、ificantly different between junior Chinese English majors and native speakers. These pairs include alive-dead, big-little, big-small, correct-incorrect, expensive-cheap, expensive-inexpensive, good-evil, healthy-unhealthy, illegal-legitimate, poor-affluent, right-incorrect, safe-dangerous, simple-co

44、mplicated, begin-end, bend-stretch, lose-win, fact-fiction, generosity-greed, guilt-punishment, and strength-weakness. There are still 6 antonymous pairs with a marginally significant difference between the above two groups. They are bad-evil, good-bad, safe-unsafe, lose-gain, lower-raise, and addit

45、ion-reduction.2021/4/226 What factors caused these? First, we performed a Multiple Regression Analysis to see which of the factors mentioned earlier (MI score, the frequency of stimulus word in the corpus, the frequency of response word in the corpus, or the frequency of co-occurrence of the two members in the antonymous pairs within a certain span in the corpus) contribute most to the judgment result. The results of Multiple Regression Analysis show that there are differences between freshmen of Engli