A Corpus-based Study Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Acquisition Of English Unaccusative Verbs

Since Perlmutter first proposed Unaccusative Hypothesis with the context of Relational Grammar in 1978, the research of the acquisition of unaccusative verbs has become a hot topic. Linguists have applied it to the analysis of different languages. They mainly focus on the overpassivization with unaccusative verbs and the analysis of the account of it. There is little focus on other errors. A lot of these studies are on the basis of the elicited data that is yielded in experimental settings, while only a limited few have exploited naturally occurring data. What’s more, few studies that are based on the naturally occurring data account for the proficiency level. In this thesis, the study is carried out on the basis of three sub-corpora ST2, ST5 and ST6 of CLEC.The paper addresses two research questions:1) What types of errors do Chinese EFL learners make during the acquisition of English unaccusatives? What are the accounts of them? 2) Will proficiency level affect Chinese EFL learners’ use of English unaccusatives?All the corpus-based study follows three major stages:1) We first retrieve nine unaccusative verbs in ST2, ST5 and ST6 of CLEC respectively by using the retrieval tool, Myfinder. In order to investigate various uses of these words, we retrieve all of the inflectional forms of the words, including the wrong ones. We delete the token sentences that are not suitable for our analysis. When the errors are identified, some irrelevant ones are neglected.2) Based on the result of the first stage, we classify the selected sentences with unpaired unaccusative verb into 4 structural patterns in order to investigate the major accounts of errors with unaccusatives from the token sentences and find the most plausible one for Chinese EFL learners.3) Based on the first stage, we figure out and compare the frequency of the errors with nine chosen unaccusatives in ST2, ST5 and ST6 of CLEC respectively in order to investigate the relation between proficiency level and Chinese EFL learners’ use of English unaccusatives.Through analyzing the results of the corpus study, we have the following findings:1) The overpassivization problem does exist when the Chinese EFL learners acquire English unaccusative verbs and there are still other errors that are causative and postverbal NP.2) The L1 transfer account can explain the cause of the errors causative and postverbal NP. As for overpassivization, we can’t explain it with only one account. It is assumed that a united account of the error should be proposed. These factors:the L1 transfer, causativization, NP movement and students’level should be taken into consideration.3) The proficiency level plays a vital role in Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English unaccusatives. The more advanced the proficiency level is, the better Chinese EFL learners acquire English unaccusative verbs.This study yielded some implications in the process of acquiring unaccusative verbs:1) The English instructors should further classify the intransitive verbs into unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs and introduce the unaccusative/unergative distinction.2) When we account for the errors with unaccusative verbs, L1 transfer is one of the causes, so the instructors should focus on the cross-linguistic influence. They should tell the students the difference between Chinese unaccusative verbs and English ones.3) On the basis of our corpus study, overpassivization is the main error with unaccusative verbs during Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English unaccusative verbs. It is advisable for instructors to inform the Chinese EFL learners of the unique semantic and syntactic features of unaccusative verbs. When learners begin to learn the passivization rule of English transitive verbs, instructors may remind the learners of guarding against the use of passive forms of unaccusative verbs. 4) The last implication is to compile L2 grammar books and found a platform on the internet to mention unaccusative verbs and their inappropriate presentation so that L2 learners can understand this particular type of verbs deeper and have a better command of them.