The Effects Of Cognitive Markedness On The Ditransitive Construction Transfer In Chinese-English Interlanguage

Native language transfer is one of the most important issues in the study ofinterlanguage. Since the1950s, different theories and opinions about languagetransfer have emerged. With the rapid development of interdisciplines, researchers tryto explore language transfer from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Researchershave reached a consensus on the importance of native language transfer and they havebeen more concerned with the constraints on language transfer and how L1influencesL2, i.e. the problem of prediction, which has an especially important bearing on thestudy of language transfer. In terms of transferability, quite a few scholars have madeuse of markedness to explore the reasons behind the phenomenon. DitransitiveConstruction has always been the focus of language research. L2learners tend tomake mistakes in the construction. Researches in the past mainly focused on theanalysis of the formation and syntax of ditransitive constructions from the perspectiveof construction theory and UG and the contrastive analysis of ditransitive constructionbetween Chinese and English. There have been few researches on the ditransitiveconstructions from the perspective of language transfer. From this perspective, we cananalyze the acquisition of the construction and explore the reasons for makingmistakes, making contributions to the L2learning and L2teaching.The study of language transfer has experienced several development stages, thatis, behaviorism, mentalist stage, and cognitive stage. Since the1960s, with therejection of contrastive analysis, the research on language transfer has also beencalled into question. From the late1970s to the1980s and1990s, the effects of native language on L2learning became important again with the development of empiricalstudies and cognitive linguistics. Moreover, language transfer is not only easilyregarded as a pragmatic problem, but also deemed as a complex cognitive process.Markedness theory as an important theory of cognitive linguistics paves a newway for the exploration of the essence of language transfer. The development ofmarkedness theory can be divided into four stages. Firstly, the concept of markednesswas first made use of by Prague School in general linguistic studies such asphonology, morphology and semantics. Secondly, in the1950s, Greenberg et al.applied the theory to the cross linguistic research and divided languages of differentcountries into different typologies, forming linguistic typology. Thirdly, based on thisconception of markedness, Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) was putforward by Eckman in1977, and he proposed the degree of markedness, which getsrid of the shortcomings of dichotomy and makes great contributions to thedevelopment of markedness theory. Lastly, Kellerman in1977pointed out thedeficiencies of the theory of Eckman and put forward the research of thepsycholinguistic markedness. Because of the limitation of Kellerman and the vaguedefinition of markedness, the achievement of language transfer received from theperspective of psycholinguistic markedness is rather limited. There are threeshortcomings in the study of Kellerman: ignoring the influence of proficiency;focusing only on the influence of perceived markedness of native language on transfer,but ignoring the effects of perceived markedness of target language; ignoring therelationship between markedness and actual transfer.In accordance with the shortcomings mentioned above, the present researchintends to carry out an experiment to testify the validity of Kellerman’s theory andmake up the shortcomings of it to further develop and perfect markedness theory. Inthe experiment, the subjects are divided into three groups, that is,45high schoolstudents in Grade one from Qingdao NO.9middle school (the primary level);34sophomores of English major from Ocean University of China (the intermediate level);30postgraduates of Engllish major in Grade three from Ocean University of China(the advanced level). There are altogether two tasks involved in the experiment: translation task and questionnaire. After getting rid of unqualified questionnaires, theauthor chooses30subjects from each group randomly for the convenience of statistics.The research makes use of qualitative as well as quantitative analysis. As to the datafrom the experiment, both SPSS16.0and EXCEL are used as tools for the analysis.Four findings are concluded in the research:1. Proficiency is closely correlated to the perceived markedness of English,psychodistance, transferability judgment as well as the actual amount of transfer,but not correlated to the perceived markedness of Chinese.2. The psychotypicality (perceived markedness) of English and Chineseditransitive construction is correlated to transferability.3. The psychotypology (psycho-distance) between Chinese and Englishditransitive construction does influence transferability.4. Transferability has its predicative power in transfer performance, but someother cognitive factors may compensate its weakness.At last, the paper explains the theoretical implications to the development oflanguage transfer theory, markedness theory, SLA theory as well as pedagogicalimplications to language teaching. At the same time, the limitations of the research arealso pointed out to make contributions for further research.