L2 Acquisition Of English Dative Alternation By Chinese EFL Learners

The present research draws on the research results both in China and abroad, and takes Pinker's theory on English dative alternation as its frame work, with the help of Goldberg's Construction Grammar to investigate the L2 acquisition of English dative alternation by Chinese EFL learners. Specifically, verb classes, learners' proficiency level, and the effect of learners' L1, will be analyzed in this thesis. The present research mainly draws on and expands Inagaki (1997) and Whong-Barr and Schwartz (2003).The present research has theoretical significance in conducting an empirical research to testify Pinker's theory and study the L2 acquisition of English dative alternation by Chinese EFL learners and enriching our understanding of English ditransitive construction from the perspective of Goldberg's Construction Grammar. Its practical significance lies in its purpose to improve Chinese EFL learner' learning of English dative alternation, especially that of ditransitive construction, or double-object dative as used in this thesis.The research questions to be addressed in this study are: (1) Will Chinese EFL learners distinguish the DODs containing one kind of verb class from those containing another kind of verb class? (2) Does learners' English proficiency level have effects on their acquisition of English dative alternation? (3) Does learners' L1 have effects on their acquisition of English dative alternation?To answer these questions, a fine-grained cross-linguistic comparison was carried out with a constructionist view. Our analysis shows that the canonical construction for ditransitive verbs in Chinese is the preverbal prepositional gei/ba/jiang construction. A V-gei bi-morphemic compound is gaining ground in becoming a single verb, and it is the marked form or construction for dative alternations. We formulated 5 specific hypotheses based on specific verb-classes and one general hypothesis: the Canonical Construction Hypothesis. In this thesis, two test papers were used to collect information on the acquisition of English dative alternation and testify the above mentioned hypotheses. 92 college students were chosen to participate in the experiment. The results revealed that all groups of Chinese EFL learners showed a preference for PDs over DODs for all the verb classes investigated, verifying our canonical construction hypothesis. It indicates that the ease of internalizing what is already internalized in L1 is strengthened in the L2 grammar.The developmental paths for different conflation verb classes vary. On the one hand, the acquisition of the dative alternation by adult L2 learners seems to be governed by the properties of an equivalent structure in the L1 relative to the properties of the target structure as found in Inagaki (1997), our findings regarding alternating tell-class and bring and take, fix-class and for the non-alternating push-class. On the other hand, we found the acquisition process is more of the interaction of UG, target language input, overgeneralization and L1 transfer. Positive evidence and lack of positive evidence and/or negative evidence play an important role in this interaction. Learners' knowledge of well-formed dativizability with some verb classes increases along with the growth of their English proficiency. With other verb-classes their knowledge of the ill-formed dativizability also grows with the increase of their language proficiency.Finally, implications of the present research for L2 teaching and learning and its limitations were discussed.