The Acquisition Of Chinese "Verb-Adjectival Resultative" Complements By Native English Speakers

The “Verb-Resultative” Complements is one of the important grammar points in Chinese Mandarin,among which,the “Verb-Adjectival Resultative” Complements is particularly complicated,in both structure and semantics,and it is also an important difficulty in second language acquisition and Chinese language teaching as a foreign language.By using test questionnaire,this paper explores the acquisition situation of Chinese “Verb-Adjectival Resultative” Complements of ninety English speaking students,who are with elementary,intermediate and advanced Chinese levels and from two Confucius Institutes in South Africa.Specifically,this paper mainly investigates from these two aspects: semantic acquisition and syntactic acquisition,and the learners' semantic understanding and sentence pattern acquisition are discussed respectively.The survey results show that:First,to native English speakers,there exists two difficulty Sequences in the semantic comprehension of the five types of Chinese “Verb-Adjectival Resultative”Complements.Sequence 1 is EC> AB> D(a part or organ of human body,Agent>Verb predicate,Object> tool or location),and Sequence 2 is D>ABC>E(tool or location> Verb predicate,Object,Agent>a part or organ of human body),the two sequences are quite similar,indicating that the understanding of the three types of“Verb-Adjectival Resultative” Complements(A,B,and C)has no significant difference,and their degree of comprehension all are quite low,located in the middle of the sequence.In addition,the main reason for the formation of the above difficulty sequences is likely due to “L1 negative transfer” and “fixed collocation learning”.Moreover,due to "over-generalization," learners have a tendency to “A-type” in their understanding of the five types of “Verb-Adjectival Resultative” Complements.Second,to native English speakers,there exists one difficulty Sequence in the acquisition of five types of sentence patterns: C2,C3,C4> C1> C(“Ba”sentence,“Bei” sentence,Verb repeating sentence> Common sentence Formula 2> Common sentence Formula1);“Linguistic complexity” and “L1 negative transfer” jointly affect the formation of the sequence,and “L1 negative transfer” has an advantageous effect.Third,there are two main types of errors in the acquisition of the five sentence patterns of native English speakers: “Omissions” and “disordered”.Among them,“Omissions” includes four categories: omission of verbs,omission of "Ba/Bei",omission of objects and omission of Resultative.“disordered” includes three categories: the disordering of objects/Resultative,the disordering of "le" and the disordering of verbs.“L1 negative transfer” and “target language interference” are the main causes of these errors.Fourth,Chinese level has a significant effect on the acquisition of the Chinese“Verb-Adjectival Resultative” Complements by native English speakers.Fifth,to native English speakers,the “Verb-Adjectival Resultative” Complements is one difficult grammar.In the process of semantic acquisition and syntactic acquisition,phenomenons like “Staged Rigidity”,“Fall Back” and “Fossilization” all occurred respectively,and even at the advanced stage,it cannot be completely mastered by native English speakers.