The L2 Acquisition Of English Resultative Construction By Chinese College Students

As an important linguistic phenomenon, the resultative construction (RC), also known as resultatives, occupies a unique place in the study of syntax and semantics. It has been a major focus of research on the syntax-semantics interface both in English and Chinese in the recent decades. The present study mainly investigates the L2 acquisition of English RCs by Chinese College learners. In particular it attempts to answer the following questions: Is there a certain order in the acquisition of English resultative construction? And does the L1 (first language) play a role in the process?To gain a better understanding of the nature of the construction as well as the nature of the Universal Grammar, a cross-linguistic analysis of the RC in English and Chinese is carried out with a unified definition of this construction in English and Chinese that states "a construction which consists of a primary predicate V₁ and a resultative predicate V₂". I offer a sketchy analysis of the current syntactic and semantic studies and point out the similarities and differences of the construction both in English and Chinese.The empirical investigation, using a grammaticality judgment task, is carried out within the framework of "Semantic Salience Hierarchy Hypothesis Model". 95 learners of the three different levels (i.e. pre-intermediate, intermediate and advanced) participated in the investigation. The study mainly examines the acquisition of English RC by these students, and along with the acquisition of canonical resultative construction and make (or causative) construction.The major findings of the study are as follows:Apparently, years of English learning and the increase of proficiency level are marked by improvement in the acquisition of English RC. However, all proficiency levels seem to follow the acquisition order, namely, Make Construction> canonical result constructions > resultative construction. Resultatives can be divided into property resultatives and resultatives of path, and both of them share causative and non-causative property of resultatives. All three groups showed a preference of canonicals over Resultatives in the acceptance of causative and non-causative resultatives of property. However, a different pattern emerged with the resultatives of path, i.e. the participants found resultatives of path more acceptable than canonical result constructions.L1 transfer is selective in that it happens in some L2 English structures, but its effect is not seen in all the L2 structures. L1 transfer is obvious with make construction and this can be attributed to the fact that Chinese expresses causation overtly with a separate verb shi meaning "make". However, in the case study of "sweep clean the room", possible negative transfer did not appear.The preference of canonicals over resultatives even by the advanced group of participants may be due to the fact that resultative construction is seldom taught in schools. However, since resultatives are perfect English as being simple and more standard than canonical result constructions, it is highly necessary for English teachers to teach the resultative construction as one important aspect of grammar.