A Corpus-based Study on the Acquisition of "Ba" Construction by Thai Learners
Caijun Lin · NRCT Data Center
Based on the second grade students’ compositions corpus (about 700,000 characters) from School of Sinology at Mae Fah Luang University, the study investigates and analyzes the use and acquisition orders of “Ba” construction by Thai primary level learners. We find that the sub-constructions of “Ba” structures’ frequency of use is highest, the secondary is the “verb-objects”, and no “causative meaning” “Ba” structures appears. There are four types of errors; the order of occurring error from the most to the least is as follows: omission, substitution, addition error, sequential error. Finally we explore the acquisition order of “Ba” constructions by Thai learners, and some suggestions on the selecting and sequencing the constructions are given.