L2 Acquisition Of Chinese Fictive Motion Constructions By English-speaking Learners

The present study is an investigation on the L2 acquisition of Chinese fictive motion constructions by native English-speaking Chinese learners(hereinafter “NES Chinese learners”).Fictive motion constructions refer to expressions that contain a motion verb but denote no physical motion of the figure.As for the coextension path fictive motion constructions,it is a depiction of the form,the orientation or the location of a spatially extended object in terms of a path over the object's extent.In the present study,coextension path fictive motion constructions are selected as the research focus mainly because it is the prototype of fictive motion constructions as well as a pervasive construction in language.Besides,scrutinizing the previous literatures both at home and abroad,it reveals the fact that most research on fictive motion constructions are theoretical or contrastive studies.Matlock carries out a series of research on the fictive motion constructions from the perspective of psychology.The findings reveal the fact that human brain mentally simulates motion during comprehending fictive motion constructions.This research area calls for more empirical studies on it,especially the empirical studies on L2 acquisition of Chinese fictive motion constructions by the NES Chinese learners.Therefore,the present thesis makes an attempt to fill the gap by investigating L2 acquisition of Chinese fictive motion constructions by NES Chinese learners with different levels of Chinese proficiency.As for the theoretical foundation,both the syntactic and the semantic properties of fictive motion constructions in terms of Figure,Path,Manner,and Distance are put forward based on the Motion Event Theory by Talmy(2000).Contrastive studies between Chinese and English fictive motion constructions are carried out as follows.On the basis of L1 Transfer Theory by Odlin(2001),three hypotheses are formulated:1.NES Chinese learners may perform better on Figure,Path and Manner of Chinese fictive motion constructions than on their acquisition of Distance for the reason that English fictive motion constructions possess similar semantic properties with Figure,Path and Manner and different semantic property with Distance.2.NES Chinese learners' comprehension of Chinese fictive motion constructions develops alongside their general Chinese proficiency.To be more exact,the higher the Chinese proficiency,the better the NES Chinese learners are able to understand Chinese fictive motion constructions.3.NES Chinese learners' production of Chinese fictive motion constructions develops alongside their general Chinese proficiency.To put it differently,the higher the Chinese proficiency,the better the NES Chinese learners are able to produce Chinese fictive motion constructions.For the purpose of examining the hypotheses,a task for sentence grammaticality and meaningfulness judgment were conducted on NES Chinese learners for their understanding of Chinese fictive motion constructions and a translation task also applied to examine their production of Chinese fictive motion constructions.60 NES Chinese learners majoring in Chinese were involved in the experiment and for the contrast between NES Chinese learners and native Chinese,30 native Chinese participants who worked the control group were also involved in the tests.The major findings of the study are as follows:The first hypothesis is fully confirmed that NES Chinese learners perform better on Figure,Path and Manner of Chinese fictive motion constructions than on their acquisition of Distance for the reason that English fictive motion constructions possess similar semantic properties with Figure,Path and Manner and different semantic property with Distance.The research results show that NES Chinese learners acquire Chinese fictive motion constructions alongside a certain acquisition order---Figure> Manner> Path> Distance.Concerning the second hypothesis,the research results indicate that the high proficiency participants perform significantly better than the less proficiency participants in their acquisition of Figure,Manner and Path.It confirms that the higher proficiency the better they are able to acquire different kinds of properties with Chinese Fictive Motion Constructions.As for the Distance,neither the high proficiency group nor the less proficiency group are able to acquire it and no significant difference is found between these two groups.As for the third hypothesis,the participants were not able to finish the translation task,especially for the less proficiency participants' poor writing ability.Therefore the data is not collected.The results are mainly based on the analysis of the participants' incomplete answers.The results reveal that the participants' production of Chinese fictive motion constructions follows a certain acquisition order---Figure>Manner>Path>Distance.With the purpose of contrasting differences between the NES of Chinese learners and Chinese native speakers,the control group was included in the experimental design.As the control group,Chinese native speakers reveal their acquisition characteristics different from the corresponding NES Chinese learners.Chinese nativespeakers follow a certain acquisition order---Path> Figure>Manner> Distance.English fictive motion constructions are characterized by various specifiablity of time.However,Chinese fictive motion constructions tend to resist any time to be specified and exhibit different specifiablity of Distance instead.Therefore,NES Chinese learners lack the sufficient input of Distance.In this regard,they fail to acquire both the syntactic and the semantic property with Distance.This result calls for more attention to be paid to the acquisition of this property.The findings in the present empirical study will bring some pedagogical implications to Chinese learning and teaching.First,the study will reveal L2 acquisition characteristics of Chinese fictive motion constructions.Second,the results will give teachers who teaching foreigners Chinese a detailed picture of NES Chinese learners' acquisition characteristics of Chinese fictive motion constructions.Third,the findings of the study will surely attract the attention to the translation studies of fictive motion constructions.What is more,the results of the study will also enrich the empirical studies of Chinese fictive motion constructions.