On The L2 Acquisition Of Chinese Psych Verbs By CSL Learners

Psych verbs are verbs describing one’s state of mind and they could be divided into Experiencer Subject(ES)and Experiencer Object(EO)psych verbs in terms of the syntax-semantics interface.Both ES and EO psych verbs are two-place predicate which assign the same theta-roles of Experiencer and Theme,but their structural positions of the corresponding arguments are reversed.This theta-role inversion questions the Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis(UTAH)of Baker(1988)and poses challenges to theoretical research.In addition,the differences between English and Chinese psych verbs lie in syntactic features,especially in the expression of the causativization.Causativization consists of lexical causatives and periphrastic causatives.Lexical causatives are frequently used in English while periphrastic causatives are more common in Chinese.English EO psych verbs convey the meaning of causativization,however,this feature is not distinctive in Chinese.Light verbs like shi,ling,rang and jiao need to be added before verbs to realize causativization in periphrastic construction.Moreover,it is believed by Zhang(2001a)that English EO psych verbs outnumber Chinese EO psych verbs.The number of English EO psych verbs is over 200,while the number of Chinese EO psych verbs is limited to 30.Therefore,most English EO psych verbs do not have their equivalent counterparts in Chinese.In summary,the characteristic feature of psych verb constructions and the differences between Chinese and English psych verb constructions cause learning difficulties for CSL learners.The present study investigated the acquisition of Chinese psych verb constructions by CSL learners based on relevant theories from the areas of syntax and SLA.The experimental group consisted of 25 CSL learners from universities in Guangdong province.They were divided into lower-intermediate group and advanced group in terms of their language proficiency levels.The participants of the control group were 15 local university students.Based on Zhang’s(2001b)categorizations of Chinese psych verb constructions,the study focused on the acquisition of Chinese ES psych verb construction,Chinese EO psych verb construction and the periphrastic causative construction of Chinese psych verbs.Three tasks were conducted in this research to explore CSL learners’ interlanguage representation as well as sentence processing,and they were English-Chinese translation task,acceptability judgment task and self-paced reading task.After the collection of linguistic data,the statistical and analytical software IBM SPSS Statistics 22.0 was applied to perform analysis.The results show that lower-intermediate CSL learners acquire Chinese ES psych verb construction and they begin to realize the periphrastic causative construction of Chinese psych verbs.However,they do not establish basic knowledge of Chinese EO psych verb construction.Besides,lower-intermediate learners can produce the equivalent Chinese ES and EO psych verb constructions,and few of them output correct periphrastic causative constructions.As for advanced CSL learners,they are able to obtain native-like competence and performance of Chinese psych verb constructions,and they prefer to produce periphrastic causative construction in translation task.Those findings indicate that Chinese psych verb constructions can be eventually acquired with the development of learners’ language proficiency.However,the results of self-paced reading task reveal that advanced learners can only process Chinese ES psych verb construction native-likely.Therefore,those findings gave some enlightenment on CSL teaching.