The Acquisition Of English Raising Verbs

In English grammar studies, verbs like seem, appear, turn out are usually regarded as representatives of a class of verbs known as raising verbs, because when they serve as the predicates of the sentence, they will cause the subject of the complement clause to raise up to become the subject of the matrix clause. Different from general verbs, this class of verbs does not assign theta-roles to the superficial subject of the sentence, because these verbs do not select any NP argument. To put it in another way, raising verbs do not have semantic relationship with the subject of the sentence. Due to this, raising verbs are potentially problematic for language learners. In 2002 and 2005, Misha Becker carried out a series of experiments with native speakers and found that native English speakers have some difficulties in acquiring raising verbs. Callies (2005), based on the analysis of second language writing corpus, showed that German-speaking learners of English tended to avoid using all types of raising structures. In German, the use of raising verbs is subject to more restrictions. Based on the results of Becker (2002, 2005)which investigated the acquisition of English raising verbs by native speakers, Xie Yuanhua (2008) tested the sensitivity of Chinese-speaking learners of English to those semantic and syntactic features of English raising verbs and the results showed that Chinese students had no sensitivity or a weak sensitivity to these features, which continued to be the case even when the students reached the advanced stage of learning English, they were still insensitive to the semantic and syntactic features of raising verbs and still can not use raising verbs in a complete correct way. We can see that English raising verbs is a language phenomenon which poses difficulties in the acquisition in a universal way, they are not only difficult for second language learners but also for English native speakers. But until so far, there has been no reliable empirical research on second language acquisition of English raising verbs. Conducting in-depth studies of this phenomenon will help us to understand the common nature of the mechanisms of second language learning of verbs, which in turn, is of great significance to the development of the field of second language acquisition and has important inspiration to the improvement of foreign language teaching in China. This paper, based on Becker (2002, 2005), investigated the clues which Chinese college students used to distinguish raising verbs from control verbs, and explored the possible causes of the difficulties in their acquisition of English raising verbs in the hope of providing theoretical and empirical basis for future research.4 experiments with the form of questionnaire were carried out, each of which investigated an independent test point. The first experiment inspected It vs. NP subject, the second Expletive vs. Referential It subject, the third It vs. There subject and the fourth Subject Animacy×Predicate Eventivity. 120 subjects who were sophomores from various faculties of Xiangtan University participated in the experiments and were investigated the four test points with 30 subjects for each. There were 16 versions of questionnaires in all in the four experiments with 4 versions in each test point. Subjects saw only one version of one test point. The purpose of using different versions within each test point was to test multiple examplars of each sentence type. Fillers remained the same across versions and test points, only test items were different. Test items were adapted from Becker's; fillers were invented by the author. Every questionnaire consisted of 40 sentences. In the first three experiments, each test point investigated 2 sentence types, 2 examples of each sentence type were given, so there were 4 test items and 36 fillers in the questionnaires of these three experiments. In the fourth experiment, 4 sentence types were tested, 2 examples of each sentence type were also presented, so there were 8 test items and 32 fillers in the questionnaires of the last experiment. Within each test point, version 1 and version 2 were seen by 20 subjects (10 subjects per version; half saw a forwards order of items, and half saw a reverse order of items). Version 3 and version 4 were seen by 10 subjects (5 subjects per version; items were presented in a pseudorandom order).The main results are: For control verbs, Chinese college students can basically grasp the contexts in which these verbs may occur, i.e., they are sensitive to the semantic and syntactic features indicating control verbs, while as far as raising verbs are concerned, the results are not so favorable. They can only master some contexts which allow raising verbs, i.e. they are only sensitive to some semantic and syntactic features which suggest raising verbs. More specifically, they are quite aware that expletive there subject is a very robust cue that the main verb is a raising verb, but they are not very clear about the semantic and syntactic feature of It.The difficulty of learning raising verbs was explained from the perspective of Universal Grammar. In Adults Second Language Acquisition, UG is only partially accessed, that's why college students could only grasp some contexts in which raising verbs are used, and were only sensitive to some of semantic and syntactic features indicating raising verbs. In order to help students to learn raising verbs in an efficient way, in the teaching process, teachers are supposed to tell students explicitly about the semantic and syntactic features of raising verbs to give them a clear perception of raising verbs and improve their sensitivity to these features.