Isaac Scientific Publishing

Advances in the Linguistic Sciences

An Experimental Study of L2 Acquisition of Mandarin Unaccusative Verbs by English-Speaking Learners

Download PDF (435.8 KB) PP. 35 - 54 Pub. Date: September 30, 2020

DOI: 10.22606/als.2020.23001

Author(s)

  • Catherine Shee Hei Wong*
    School of Education and Languages, The Open University of Hong Kong

Abstract

The present study investigates the acquisition of Chinese Mandarin unacussative verbs by English-speaking L2 leaners of Chinese, in light of Universal Grammar and Interlanguage (IL) phenomenon. The results of the experiment show that there is no strong evidence for the overpassivization of Mandarin unaccusative verbs, which calls into question the claim that the overpassivization phenomenon of unaccusative verbs is universal in second language acquisition (SLA). The L2 learners in our experiment performed better with non-alternating unaccusative verbs than alternating unaccusative verbs, which might suggest that learners were probably treating the alternating unaccusative verbs in our experiment as underlyingly transitive and thus accepted the ungrammatical passivized unaccusative verbs in the Grammaticality Judgement task. This phenomenon is consistent with child’s L1 development. We attribute the overpassivization of the Chinese unaccusative verbs in our experiment to the hypothesis of non-target lexical causativization as in L2 acquisition of English.

Keywords

Mandarin unaccusative verbs, universal grammar, interlanguage, overpassivization, SLA 1

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