A Study on the Acquisition of Chinese Polysemic Verb “Fang” by Intermediate and Senior Thai Students

Abstract

In the learning of Chinese as a second language, the common polysemic verbs have always been the key and difficult points of the second language learners. Among them, the verb fang 放 is a special polysemic verb, which not only has more than a dozen meanings, but also has a very high frequency of use, which leads to the bottleneck of most students when they acquire a verb with so many meanings. Therefore, based on the composition corpus and the questionnaire test corpus, this study investigates the acquisition of the meanings of the polysemic verb fang in intermediate and senior Thai students with a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods.It is found that intermediate and senior Thai students do not use the various meanings of fang in a various degree, they often use common meanings, other meanings are used less frequently, besides, most meanings are not fully comprehended. The error types are mainly caused by confused usage of different meanings and over-generalization of some meanings, some TCFL textbooks and general course syllabuses also have unreasonable arrangement of meanings. Finally, it analyzes the acquisition order of meaning items of fang by Thais, and puts forward some teaching suggestions.