Distinguishing Listen and Hear:A Corpus-based Study
The aim of this study is to examine the similarities and differences of listen to and hear using a corpusbased methodology so as to explain why these two verbs are not always substitutable. The research is based on sense analyses from WordNet 2.1 and collocational analyses from British National Corpus through using the English Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff and Tugwell, 2001). Through analyzing the collocations of the two verbs, we found that both listen to and hear can take objects which denote production of physical sounds. Both verbs can also take an event. The main difference between these two verbs, however, lies in the purposive intention of the agent in listen to but not in hear, in addition to differences in transitivity (with listen being intransitive most of the time and hear being both transitive and intransitive). Since hear usually denotes unintended events, most of its objects carry negative meanings, indicating that these negative events are encountered unexpectedly. The above observations were made through using a lexical approach and we claim that such an approach will help clarify the confusion of learners in using two related but different verbs. This study has implications in teaching and learning as well as in the study of cognitive linguistics where motivations behind the use of these two verbs can be traced.
Siaw-Fong Chung Tzu-Yun Tseng
Department of English National Chengchi University
国际会议
2009 International Conference on Applied Linguistics & Language Teaching(2009应用语言学暨语言教学国际研讨会)
台湾
英文
290-300
2009-04-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）