The Acquisition Of Chinese Unaccusative Verbs By English-speaking Learners

According to the difference of argument and syntactic structure, traditional intransitive verbs can be further classified as unaccusatives and unergatives. The difference between these two types of verbs are that, the argument of Chinese unaccusatives is object in deep structure but can be both subject and object in surface structure; while it can only be subject to unergatives no matter in deep structure or surface structure. Besides, the argument of unaccusatives is internal, taking the agent role; while unergatives take external argument and patient role.The discrepancy between unaccusatives and unergatives bring large difficulties to L2 learners'learning Chinese unaccusatives. Oshita (2001) study the acquisition route by L2 learners in his"Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis (UTP)", indicating that learners present U-shaped acquisition route while acquiring unaccusative verbs. The present study surveys the Chinese unaccusative verbs'acquisition through forty-five English-speaking learners and fifteen native speakers in the form of questionnaire investigation. Among these forty-five English-speaking learners, fifteen are from the initial stage, fifteen from the second stage, and fifteen from the final stage. The questionnaire is made up of two tasks, the Writing Production Task and the Grammaticality Judgment Task, investigating learners'production and acception of unaccusative verbs in different stages.We find that learners in their first stage can not distinguish unaccusatives and unergatives, neither do they produce or accept V-NP word order sentences. They begin to differentiate these two kinds of verbs in the second stage, but the accuracy decreases due to their unknown of their real difference. Only when they reach the final stage, can they really distinguish them and grasp the grammar features related only to unaccusatives verbs, so the accuracy increases again. This further verifies U-shaped acquisition route in"Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis".Besides, we find answers to the five predictions proposed by Oshita (2001). It is discovered that learners in the initial stage would use unaccusatives and unergatives in the same syntactic structure; syntactic errors would appear more often in then sentences with unaccusatives which are much more complicated than unergatives; some grammar features specific to unaccusatives can only be fully acquired after discriminating correctly these two types of intransitive verbs; learners'different behaviors present to be a U-shaped pattern; while prediction three is partially proved, learners make seldom syntactic errors when not differentiating unaccusatives and unergatives, but they would sometimes fail to judge their grammaticality. In addition, factors involved in L2 learners'acquisition of Chinese unaccusatives are analyzed. There are mainly four factors, Single-Argument Linking Rule; influence of the input from target language environment; first language transfer; and overgeneralization of V-NP word order sentences.Consequently, we should lead learners to distinguish unaccusatives from unergatives consciously even at their initial stage, and try to make them exposed to more target language input about the different syntactic structures of unaccusatives. Besides, we should make contrast analyses to the different usage of Chinese unaccusatives and English unaccusative, and try to prevent their overgeneralization of V-NP syntactic structure.