L2 Acquisition Of English Tough Construction By Chinese EFL Learners

English Tough Construction (TC) is one of the most difficult and delayed sentence structures in English in both first language (L1) acquisition and second language acquisition (SLA). It is reported that even advanced learners did not reach the ultimate attainment. Chinese also has a similar structure, which might well be a facilitator or impeder in second language (L2) English acquisition. The present study investigates how Chinese learners of English acquire English Tough Construction.Concerning the syntactic analysis of TC, three methods are identified including Chomsky's (1977) Wh-movement theory, Reider's (1996) NP-movement account of English TC and Huang Churen's theory (1997) on lexical nature of Chinese TC. Adopting the second and third method, we put forward operational definition of Chinese Nan/Yi Construction and think that Chinese similar structure involves a syntactic as well as a lexical reading.Based on the literature review of the acquisition of TC, the research questions to be addressed in this study are: (1) Can the L2 acquisition of English TC by Chinese speakers be accounted for by semantic transparency outlined by Yamaoka (1988)? (2) What role does L1 transfer play in the acquisition? (3) What role does proficiency play in the acquisition? To answer the three research questions, two possible factors are identified: animacy and L1 transfer which can be manifested by the semantic role hierarchy and role of proficiency.Based on Schwartz & Sprouse (1994; 1996)'s Full Transfer/Full Access theory, we put forward our first hypothesis and its empirical manifestation: the IL of beginner level Chinese learners of English will show a semantic role hierarchy which is more similar to that of their mother tongue Chinese; the IL representation of TC will show a more target-like semantic role hierarchy in keeping up with proficiency. Chinese speakers will represent lexicalized TC as derivational adjectives rather than TCs in IL. In light of the Yamaoka's semantic transparency of TC and Zhang (2002)'s Semantic Salience Hierarchy Model with animacy, we propose the second hypothesis: the learner will perform better with inanimate nouns as subject than animate nouns in the acquisition.To testify the hypotheses mentioned above, a research experiment was designed to collect information on the L2 acquisition of English TC.The result shows that the advanced learners do not reach the ultimate attainment yet. The semantic role hierarchy of beginner level is similar to that of their native language. Most of learners prefer to represent the lexicalized TC as adjectives. Animacy plays a significant role in the process of acquisition of TC. A natural order of semantic role is found: inanimate patient>inanimate locative>inanimate instrument>inanimate manner. It is also found that a U-shaped behavior is manifested concerning the role of proficiency.