a semantic analysis of iranian efl learners’ production and perception of english verbs’ argument structure

The verbal aspect as an exciting and challenging topic has been under scrutiny in linguistics. related to this issue is the production and perception of verbs argument structures in english, in which efl learners face difficulties, they also encounter learnability problems in the perception and production of english verbs’ argument structures manifested by different verbs. the researcher tried to investigate the problems our iranian participants encounter in processing these constructions semantically. to achieve the goal, seventy-five students whose major was english participated in this survey. in order to answer the research questions, an oxford placement test was conducted first to obtain three different proficiency levels: elementary, lower intermediate, and upper-intermediate. then a translation test and a grammaticality judgment test were administered after the proficiency test to estimate the participants production and perception of english verb argument structures, respectively. descriptive statistics, together with one-way anova, and a paired sample t-test, were applied to analyze the data. the results demonstrated that learners with different proficiency levels faced serious difficulties problems in producing state and comprehending accomplishment categories. more exposure to language input, explicit teaching of the argument structures along with their semantic categories, and practicing in different contexts can improve the learners’ knowledge of argument structures.