Analysis of verb argument constructions (VACs) in L2 learners across proficiency levels: A corpus-based study in L1 Indonesian

Abstract

This study investigated the constructional knowledge development of L1 Indonesian by examining nineteen Verb-Argument Constructions (VACs). The VACs examined in the present study are a verb pattern, followed by a preposition and a noun phrase, for example, “V about N” as in “He talked about the progress”. This study used the Indonesian subset of the Education First Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT) corpus from beginner to advanced levels (CEFR A1 to C1; Council of Europe, 2001). This dataset comprises 2943 writing texts (224,763 words) from 623 learners. Frequency analysis of types and tokens was conducted to examine the distribution of the 19 VACs in learner writings across levels. Growth analyses were conducted to investigate the verbs that learners most frequently associated with the most productive VACs. Correlational analyses were conducted to explore how closely related the verb-VAC associations between proficiency levels and the verb occupants in the associations. The results indicate that learners’ constructional knowledge development was implied by: (1) the frequency increase in types and tokens of VACs from lower to higher proficiency levels, (2) the variety of verbs associated with VACs, and (3) the construction schematicity increase indicated by the use of general to more specific verb productions distinct to proficiency levels. The results suggest that English language learners need more exposure to lexicogrammatical features to facilitate VACs acquisition and usage.