L2 Acquisition Of English Nominalization By Chinese EFL Learners: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective

The present study investigates L2 acquisition of English nominalization by Chinese EFL learners from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Nominalization in this study is defined as a morphological derivation from either a verb or an adjective. The relevant literature reveals that at present no empirical study has ever been conducted to explore L2 acquisition of English nominalization and that no ready-made theory is available for such an empirical study. It is also found that nominalization within the framework of generative linguistics is not taken as a regular linguistic phenomenon; instead, it is regarded as a problem of lexical listing. As for the theory of lexical semantics and Functional Grammar, they do not touch on the morphological realization of nominalization at all. Cognitive linguistics, however, claims that nominalization is regular in nature. As a branch of cognitive linguistics, Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987/1991) proposes a set of notional definitions for nouns, verbs, and adjectives, respectively. With the notional definitions, it is possible to explore the semantic commonality underlying verb-noun or adjective-noun transformation. Therefore, the present study adopts the principles of cognitive linguistics as the foundation for a conceptual framework to take on L2 acquisition of English nominalization.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, boundedness as a universal human cognitive experience is identified as a semantic commonality underlying verb-noun or adjective-noun transformation. Based on the concept of boundedness,the Boundedness Continuum is established, within which verbs are categorized into bounded verbs, quasi-bounded verbs, and unbounded verbs; and correspondingly adjectives are categorized into bounded adjectives, quasi-bounded adjectives, and unbounded adjectives. It is claimed that nominalizations can be freely derived from bounded verbs or adjectives, and also from some quasi-bounded verbs or adjectives in appropriate contexts, but not from unbounded verbs or adjectives. Thus it is predicted that Chinese EFL learners can acquire nominalizations derived from bounded verbs or adjectives more easily than those derived from quasi-bounded verbs or adjectives. Chinese EFL learners also know pretty well that nominalizations must not be derived from unbounded verbs or adjectives.Data for this study were collected from 171 Chinese participants at three different English proficiency levels. In addition, 21 native speakers of English were used as a control group. The Chinese subjects were chosen from college students majoring in English; and the native speakers of English were English teachers in universities in Guangzhou. Each Chinese participant took eight written tests on both English and Chinese nominalization, but each native speaker of English took four written tests on English nominalization. The data consisted of both the participants' judgment of acceptability on nominalization and their performance on nominalization derivation.Quantitative analyses of the collected data yielded the following major findings: (i) The empirical findings have verified the basic assumption underlying the present study, i.e. boundedness as a conceptual prime reflecting human cognitive experience is pervasive in any language. Generally speaking, the more salient an entity is, the more easily its linguistic realization can be acquired. Thus, since bounded entities are the most salient in human cognition, their embodiment in language poses no difficulty for language learners, whether in L1 or in L2. Onthe other hand, quasi-bounded entities are characterized by the fuzzy salience, and so they pose the greatest difficulty for language learners. In between these two extremes are the unbounded entities, which are more or less featured by ease of recognition due to the absence of boundaries; thus the degrees of difficulty they pose to language learners are also in between. All this suggests that the Boundedness Continuum based on the two fundamental tenets of cognitive linguistics - The Prototype...