L2 Acquisition Of English Middle Construction By Chinese Learners

The middle construction has been a widely discussed topic in syntactic studies of recent decades. Middle construction appears as a constrained form: syntactically they need an adverbial; and semantically their time reference cannot be specific. More specifically, the middle construction exhibits the following two basic characteristics: the agent theta-role is not projected in the syntax, and semantically a middle construction is a generic statement. Besides, the middle construction contains a manner adverbial adjunct and lacks the inflectional changes.The derivation of middle constructions has generated much recent debate. There are mainly two groups of approaches: lexicon approaches and syntactic approaches. The lexical analysis assumes that the external argument is deleted from the lexical entry of the verb; therefore it does not need to be structurally discharged. Without any NP-movement involved, the middle construction only has the internal argument realized as subject. On the other side, the syntactic analysis argues that middle formation requires the suppression or demotion of an external argument and the promotion of an internal argument. It is also proposed that the external argument of the middle construction is syntactically active and the realization of the internal argument's being subject involves the NP-movement.The middle construction is complicated, which brings difficulties to L2 teaching. The main purpose of the study is to investigate the development of this grammar item in the inter-language of Chinese learners of English. The study has investigated how well the middle construction is developed in the inter-language of Chinese learners. The research shows that there are differences in the acquisition of four properties of English middle construction. The sequence followed by Chinese learners in learning four properties of English middle construction is that: agentivity>genericity>unprojected agent>adverbial modifier. We also find that learners also have great difficulties in judging which verbs can be used in the middle construction and the knowledge of the middle construction increases with the learners' proficiency level.