L2 Learning Of The English Passive By Chinese Learners

The present study is concerned with the EFL learning process involved in leaning English passive structures and deals with the problem of passivizability of English verbs in this learning task. Specifically, the English verb 'own' can passivize, but 'have' cannot, as shown in The house is owned by John, and *The house is had by John. Both 'own' and 'have' are transitive verbs but they behave differently in passive sentences. Such a distinction is not normally taught in the EFL classroom. In the absence of negative evidence, do L2 learners possibly acquire the knowledge as to what verbs can or cannot participate in passivization?The above problem is approached through a linguistic analysis of the English passive structure in light of the semantic structure theory. The theory examines the lexical meanings of verbs with a view to establishing predictable links between verb semantics and syntax. It aims to locate those meaning components (e.g. 'causation', 'motion', 'change of state', and 'affectedness' ) that bear on changes in syntactic structures. Once identified, the syntactically relevant meaning components can be used to conflate or categories verb classes. Each class that has a set of distinct meaning components in common can be related to some syntactic patterns. Based on the semantic structure theory, we assume that there must be meaning components that are relevant to passivizability of verbs. An analysis of English passive constructions shows that a characteristic of the object of an active verb is crucial in determining passivization. For this we propose an Object Affected Condition (OAC) in the formation of passive sentences. OAC dictates that a verb can participate in active-passive alternation, provided that the object argument of a verb is affected or construed as being affected by an action, either literally or in an extended abstract sense. An affected object can be safely used in subject position of a passive sentence. A comparison between English passives and their Chinese equivalents indicates that Chinese has two major types of passive structures: the bei passive and the notional passive. The former corresponds to the English passive and the latter does not have exact English equivalents and is used more extensively. The notional passive is possible in Chinese but leads to ungrammaticality in English. The entailment relationship and the superset-subset relationship between the Chinese passive and the English counterpart evidence that Chinese is more inclusive than English. In other words, Chinese grammar is wider than English in terms of passive formation. The crosslinguistic variation suggests that, confronted with the learning of English passives, Chinese-speaking learners, being ignorant of the more restricted use of passives in English and having no positive evidence, may rely on their Chinese knowledge of passives in generating English passives. Thus, errors are likely to occur from the learnability point of view. To observe how Chinese learners of English acquire the English passive, three empirical studies were conducted using subjects of varying English proficiency. They were required to perform such tasks as elicited production, acceptability judgments, and novel verbs. Results showed that, when the subjects become aware that the object of transitive verbs was affected, they would be able to passivize canonical action verbs, largely free of errors. But those verbs that have to be construed as taking affected objects in an abstract sense posed much learning difficulty. With an increase in English proficiency, advanced learners performed significantly better than the low-proficiency learners and their use of English passives approximate that of English native speakers.The findings of the present study throw light on the L2 learnability problem. Passivization applies to all and only the transitive verbs that have agents and patients and that the status of the object of an active sentence is crucial in determining passivization. Causation, thus the object being af...