Animacy Effects On The L2 Acquisition Of English Passive By Chinese-Speaking Learners Of English

English passive voice is an important and difficult grammar point for L2 learners of English. Chinese-speaking learners of English will certainly meet lots of difficulties and troubles in acquiring English passive voice since there are great differences between the two passive voices on many aspects, such as structures, functions, constrains and semantics. Until now, most of the researches on English passive voice are about the contrastive study between Chinese and English passive voice, which stays at the theoretical level and tries to find out the similarities and differences between English and Chinese passive voices. However, there are few researches on the acquisition of English passive voice by Chinese-speaking learners, and the researches about the animacy effects on the acquisition of English passive by Chinese-speaking learners of English are even less mentioned.In order to put forward some suggestions and solve some problems for teaching and learning English passive, it is of great significance and importance to investigate the Chinese learners' acquisition of the English passive voice and the animacy effects in the process of acquisition. This thesis attempts to investigate the animacy effects on the acquisition of English passive by Chinese-speaking learners of English through comparing the acceptability of different collocations of animacy in English passive and active voices. Meanwhile, it also compares the acceptability of transitive verb (henceforth V_t) and psychological Verb (henceforth V_p) in acquiring English passive.A Grammaticality Judgment Test (henceforth GJT) was conducted with 68 participants. The results show that Chinese-speaking learners of English have different degree of acceptability for the four different sentence patterns designed in this thesis. In concerned with different collocations of animacy designed for the GJT, due to the L1 influence, the participants have the highest acceptability for AA collocation among all the four collocations. The test also shows that participants have trouble in acquiring II collocation.For comparison between the acceptability of V_t and V_p in different collocations of animacy among different sentence patterns, the results show that the acceptability for V_t is higher than that of V_p in English passive voice. The acceptability of V_t is higher than that of V_p for AA collocation in all the 4 sentence patterns, which shows that animacy does have effect on learners' choice of passive voice. At last, implications and suggestions are put forward to the teaching and learning of English passive voice.