The Confusion With Give and Get By Japanese Learners: Common Errors in the Basic Meaning of Property Transfer

The prototypical semantic meaning and syntactic structures of ‘give’ and ‘get’ from the perspective of the ‘transfer of property’ causes Japanese students at the University level a lot of trouble in both verbal and written discourse.The purpose of this study was to try to uncover the possible mental links these students were making with these verbs, and find out how these two very important and interrelated verbs are being misused, possible reasons for this misuse, and how they can be better understood and produced by Japanese learners of English.