An Empirical Study On Chinese EFL Learners' Acquisition Of English Unaccusatives

Since Perlmutter(1978)proposed the Unaccusative Hypothesis,the acquisition of unaccusatives has become a hot topic in the L2 research.The essential assumption of unaccusative hypothesis is that the traditional intransitives can be divided into two subclasses: unaccusatives and unergatives.Though these two subclasses manifest the same syntactical structure,namely NP +VP structure,the sole argument of unaccusatives plays the thematic role of patient,whereas that of unergatives plays the thematic role of agent.Chinese EFL learners are inclined to make such errors with unaccusatives as NP-V avoidance,NP-Be-Ven,NP1-V-NP2 and V-NP.Previous studies on English unaccusatives mainly delve into the underlying reasons for overpassivization phenomenon but few concentrate on the syntactic diagnostics of unaccusatives.The present study intends to investigate Chinese EFL learners' knowledge representation of English unaccusatives through unaccusative diagnostics under the framework of Unaccusative Hypothesis.The present study enrolls 120 Chinese EFL learners and the participants include three proficiency groups: the primary,the intermediate and the advanced group.After excluding invalid questionnaires,111 in total are valid for final data analysis.Research questions are as follows:(1)What are the Chinese EFL learners' knowledge representations of English unaccusatives?(2)Do semantic features affect Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of English unaccusatives? If yes,to what extent?(3)What is the role of language proficiency in EFL learners' acquisition of English unaccusatives? The grammatical judgment task adopted here is from Hirakawa(2003)and the data obtained are analyzed through SPSS and Excel.The findings can be summarized as follows.First,Chinese EFL learners have difficulty with unaccusative verbs and their acquisition of unaccusative verbs is worse than that of unergative verbs.Generally,Chinese EFL learners could make a distinction between unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs.Second,Chinese EFL learners are sensitive to the semantic constraints that divide unaccusatives into different subclasses.In NP-V construction,results suggest learners' acquisition of verbs of change of location(CL)is the best,that of change of state(CS)is the worst and that of existence and appearance is in the middle.Third,Language proficiency exerts an influence on Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of English unaccusatives.In general,Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of English unaccusatives develops as their language proficiency improves.