The Confusion with “Give” and “Get” by Japanese Learners: Common Errors in the Basic Meaning of Property Transfer
- 1 Center for English Language Education of Asia University, Tokyo, Japan
- 2 Institute for the Development and Support of Higher Education of Fukuoka University, Fukuoka, Japan
- 3 Center for English Language Education of Asia University, Tokyo, Japan
Abstract
The prototypical semantic meaning and syntactic structures of “give” and “get” from the perspective of the “transfer of property” causes Japanese students at the University level a lot of trouble in both verbal and written discourse. The purpose of this study was to try to uncover the possible mental links these students were making with these verbs, and find out how these two very important and interrelated verbs are being misused, possible reasons for this misuse, and how they can be better understood and produced by Japanese learners of English. Through this research, it would appear that more comprehensive pedagogical practice that encourages students to see and experiment with the fuller ranges of verbs and their complements could help students to understand and produce these verbs more enthusiastically, confidently, and competently. In order to conduct this research, a test was administered to 96 students with fourteen questions separated into three sections, completed within ten minutes. The results showed that, generally speaking, it appears as if the students are having an extremely hard time reproducing the correct usage of both “give” and “get” in the second language (L2). More research should be conducted to find out more about the reasons for the difficulties and how Japanese students can successfully overcome them.
- Aitchison, J. (1994). Words in the Mind. (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
- Allerton, D. J. (1982).Valency and the English Verb. London: Academic Press.
- Baron, N. S. (1977). Language Acquisition and Historical Change. Amsterdam: North Holland.
- Bleiler, E. F. (1963). Basic Japanese Grammar. New York, NY: Dover Publications.
- Brown, H. D. (2000). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. (4th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
- Browne, A. C., McCray, A.T., & Srinivasan, S. (2000). “The Specialist Lexicon” Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. Bethesda, MD: National Library of Medicine.
- Coulthard, M., Knowles, M., Moon, R., & Deignan, A. (2000). Lexis. (2nd ed.). Birmingham: The Centre for English Language Studies.
- Craik, F., & Lockhart, R. (1972). Levels of Processing: A Framework for Memory Research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671-684. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(72)80001-X
- Fillmore, C. J. (1977). The Case for Case Reopened. In Syntax and Semantics (Vol. 8). Grammatical Relations. Academic Press, Inc.
- Gronemeyer, C. (1999). On Deriving Complex Polysemy: The Grammaticalization of GET. English Language and Linguistics, 3, 1-39. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674399000118
- Hamada, M., & Yokokawa, H. (2019). Effects of Proficiency on Syntactic Priming in the Language Production of Japanese EFL Learners. JACET Journal, 63, 47-64.
- Hatch, E., & Brown, C. (1995). Vocabulary, Semantics, and Language Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Hulstin, J. H., & Laufer, B. (2001). Some Empirical Evidence for the Involvement Load Hypothesis in Vocabulary Acquisition. Language Learning, 51, 539-558.
- Ishii, M. (2005). Personal Communication in Fukuoka, Japan.
- Jackendoff, R. (1994). Word Meanings and What It Takes to Learn Them: Reflections on the Piaget-Chomsky Debate. In W. F. Overton, & D. S. Palermo (Eds.), The Jean Piaget Symposium Series. The Nature and Ontogenesis of Meaning (pp. 129-144). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. (Reprinted in Modified form from R. Jackendoff, “Languages of the Mind,” MIT Press, 1992)
- Johansson, S., & Oksefjell, S. (1996). Towards a Unified Account of the Syntax and Semantics of GET. In J. Thomas, & M. Short (Eds.), Using Corpora for Language Research (pp. 57-55). London: Longman.