A Bidirectional Study Of Learning English And Chinese Passives From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

As an interdisciplinary study of SLA and Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, ConceptualTransfer represents one of the new trends in language transfer research. The present paper is acorpus-based study. From the perspective of Conceptual Transfer, it analyzes English andChinese passive errors made by Chinese learners and English speaking learners bidirectionally.English interlanguage corpus used in this paper comes from Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC), and Chinese interlanguage data are from HSK Dynamic Composition Version1.1,Chinese Interlanguage Corpus of Zhongshan University as well as data collected fromChinese passive test done among English speaking learners by the author. When it comes tothe analysis, the author mainly employed Talmy’s “Force Dynamic Schema” in CognitiveSemantics and “Conceptual Transfer Framework” proposed by Zhang Huiping to interpretEnglish and Chinese passive errors from the aspects of prototype, passive category systemand their conceptual properties.The major findings are:(1) Force Dynamic Schema has a strong explanatory power on the analysis of theprototype of English and Chinese passives as well as some other passive events. For example,according to “Force Dynamic Schema of Passive Event”, the conceptual differences among[意义被动句],[被字句],[PASSIVE VOICE] can be reflected in different ways of the forceentities’ demotion and salience. While the conceptual differences between [BY] and [被] in English and Chinese passives are caused by the distinctive ways of encoding information inforce entities. Besides, some related passive concepts like [DONE] and [光杆动词+补语/了]can be distinguished from [DO] and [光杆动词] through the force entities’access restriction in“Force Dynamic Schema of Passive Event”.(2) For both Chinese and English speaking learners, the learning of English and Chinesepassives are highly influenced by their source language conceptual system withsystematicness and some common features. Compared with English native speakers, Chineselearners use less English passive voice and prefer to use long passive voice. Among theEnglish passive errors made by Chinese learners, pseudo-passive is the most common errortype which accounts for more than half of the total errors, overpassivization andhybrid-passive are almost the same in error numbers. Among the Chinese passive errors madeby English speaking learners, hybrid-passive is the most common error type,overpassivization occupies the second place and pseudo-passive is the least one. Overall,English and Chinese passive errors made by Chinese and English speaking learners areroughly complementary in error types.(3) The primary causes of English and Chinese passive errors made by both learners aredue to the conceptual transfer from Chinese [被动句] and English [PASSIVE VOICE] andtheir conceptual properties respectively. The corresponding Chinese conceptual category ofEnglish [PASSIVE VOICE] is Chinese [被动句]. While Chinese [被动句] includes twosub-categories:[意义被动句] and [被字句] in which [意义被动句] is the primary conceptualcategory. Besides, there exist both similarities and differences among English [PASSIVEVOICE], Chinese [意义被动句] and [被字句] as well as the conceptual properties theypossessing. Therefore, in order to avoid English and Chinese passive errors, it is necessary forboth learners to adjust or even change their original passive conceptual categories, andrestructure passive conceptual categories which adapt to the target language.(4) Conceptual transfer in English and Chinese passives not only comes from Chinese［被动句］and English [PASSIVE VOICE] as well as their conceptual properties, but also arisefrom some related conceptual categories involving both lexical and sentential levels. So,conceptual transfer of Chinese［被动句］and English [PASSIVE VOICE] should also include conceptual transfer of Chinese ［动词］,［句子］and English［VERB］,［SENTENCE］along with the conceptual properties that they possess.This bidirectional study systematically shows the conceptual differences andcharacteristics of English and Chinese passive errors made by Chinese and English speakinglearners. Besides, some cognitive explanations are given from the perspective of ConceptualTransfer. This study not only supports Conceptual Transfer Hypothesis to a large extent, butalso expands the application of theories in Cognitive Linguistics.