An Empirical Study On Reverse Transfer In The Use Of Chinese Unmarked Passive Sentence Of College Students In China

Reverse transfer refers to the effect of learners' knowledge of a second language on their knowledge and use of mother language.At present,empirical studies on reverse transfer in China focus on the pragmatic perspective.Few studies have been conducted on reverse syntactic transfer in China.According to the classifications of Chinese unmarked passive sentence proposed by Li(2001),Xie(2010),and Zou(2016),this thesis summarizes three categories of Chinese unmarked passive sentence,totally eight types,as the research object.Based on the theory of common underlying conceptual basis(CUCB)and psycholinguistic markedness,this study aims to investigate the phenomenon of reverse transfer in the use of unmarked passive sentence of Chinese college students as well as the effects of L2 proficiency and markedness on reverse transfer.Chinese college students and junior school students were chosen as the experimental group and control group respectively.Sentence translation from English to Chinese and sentence judgment test combined with an interview were employed to collect data.Major findings are as follows:Firstly,it is proved that the use of Chinese unmarked passive sentence of college students is affected by their acquisition of English passive sentence.In the sentence judgment task,a significant difference is found in the mean scores of judgment on both acceptable and unacceptable sentences between the experimental group and control group,which suggests the existence of reverse transfer.Due to the effects of English passive structure,compared with those in the control group,subjects in the experimental group overuse Bei-sentence and show higher acceptance for unacceptable sentences,perceiving them as more unmarked.Secondly,Shi...De structure is less influenced by the English passive sentence compared with SV and SVO structures.Among the other seven types of unmarked passive sentence,judgments on unacceptable type 2(NP + Adv.+ V),type 3(NP + V + Complement),type 5(NP + V + Object),and type 6(NP + Adv.+ V + Object)of non-English majors are significantly different from that of control group.Type 6 is perceived as less used and relatively more marked than the other three types.Results are related to the difference between English and Chinese passive sentence and difference of subjects' language habits of SV and SVO passive structures.Thirdly,L2 proficiency of subjects in the experimental group was divided into three groups based on their translation test scores.Results of Post Hoc test demonstrate that there is a significance of the judgment on unacceptable sentences between Group Three(intermediate-low level)and Group One(advanced level)as well as Group Two(intermediate-high level).No significance is found in judgment on acceptable sentences between three groups.The result of translation test shows that subjects in group three are prone to overuse Bei-sentence compared with subjects in Group One and Group Two.This conclusion is related to L2 proficiency and the correlation between L2 proficiency and psycholinguistic markedness.This study,to some extent,contributes to the enrichment of empirical studies on reverse transfer,makes a new attempt at studies on passive sentence in reverse transfer,and proposes some theoretical and pedagogical implications for future research and SLA.