L2 Acquisition Of English Fictive Motion Expressions By Chinese EFL Learners

The present study investigates L2 acquisition of English coextension path Fictive Motion Expressions(hereafter FMEs) by Chinese EFL learners with different levels of English proficiency.FMEs refer to expressions that contain a motion verb but denote no physical motion of the subject. As for the coextension path Fictive Motion(hereafter FM), it is a depiction of the form, orientation or location of a spatially extended object in terms of a path over the object’s extent. In the present study, coextension path FM was selected as our research focus mainly because it is the prototype of FM as well as the hot topic in the realm of cognitive linguistics. Besides, by conducting literature review both at home and abroad extensively, it was found that most research on FM were theoretical or contrastive studies. Although Matlock and her colleagues have conducted a series of experiments on coextension path FM,their work only focused on English native speakers and aimed at the stance that people do mentally simulate motion when they are processing FMEs. Not enough attention has been paid to the empirical studies on FM, let alone the empirical studies on L2 acquisition of English FMEs by Chinese EFL learners. Therefore, the present paper attempts to fill the gap by investigating L2 acquisition of English coextension path FMEs by Chinese EFL learners with different levels of English proficiency.To achieve the goal, the syntactic and the semantic properties of FMEs in terms of Figure, Path, Manner, and Duration of Motion are first characterized. Then a comparative study between Chinese and English coextension path FMEs is conducted. On the basis of language transfer theory, two hypotheses are formulated: 1) Chinese EFL learners may perform better on their acquisition of the knowledge about Figure, Path and Manner in English coextension path FMEs than on the acquisition of Duration of Motion; and it is also assumed that Chinese EFL learners performed best on the acquisition of the syntactic and the semantic properties of Figure, followed by Path, then Manner, and at last Duration of Motion.2) High-level participants may perform better than low-level participants in terms of their acquisition of FMEs.To test the hypotheses, 80 students representing two different English proficiency levels(i.e. low level and high level) participated in the grammaticality judgment task(GJT), and 15 English native speakers were recruited to participate in the experiment functioned as a control group. In the experiment, two independent variables are involved: test focus, including fourlevels(i.e. four test focuses) and English proficiency, including two levels(i.e., high level and low level). Thus, a two-way ANOVA(mixed design) is conducted to analyze the data and a Post Hoc test is performed to find where the differences lie through the software SPSS 16.0.The major findings of the study are as follows:First, hypothesis 1 is overturned. The participants perform best on the acquisition of the syntactic and the semantic properties of Figure and Path, followed by the acquisition of the syntactic and the semantic properties of Manner and Duration of Motion. Figure and Path are classified as a homogeneous subset while Manner and Duration of Motion are classified as the other homogeneous subset.Second, hypothesis 2 is confirmed. The results show that English proficiency may affect Chinese EFL learners’ performance on the acquisition of English coextension path FMEs.Generally, the high-level participants perform better than the low-level participants. To be more specific, the high-level participants perform significantly better than the low-level participants on their acquisition of the syntactic and the semantic properties of Figure, Path and Manner, but no significant difference was found in their performances on the acquisition of the syntactic and the semantic properties of Duration of Motion.At last, in order to find out the potential difficulties in the acquisition of FMEs,Independent-sample t-test is run on the high-level participants and the native speakers’ data.The results reveal that the native speakers perform significantly better than the high-level participants in terms of the syntactic and the semantic properties of Figure, Path and Manner,which indicates that even the high-level participants cannot reach the level of the native speakers. However, it is also found that there was no significant difference between the high-level participants’ and the native speakers’ performance on acquiring the syntactic and the semantic properties of Duration of Motion, indicating that even the native speakers do not perform well on the knowledge of the syntactic and the semantic property of Duration of Motion. Detailed investigations show that the native speakers are only aware of the knowledge of the syntactic and the semantic property of Duration of Motion in terms of the prototype of coextension path FMEs—Hypothetical Motion, but do not know the exact rules in terms of the Duration of Motion in Sight Motion and Actual Motion, the peripheral types.The results indicate that L1 Transfer Theory plays an important role in L2 acquisition of English coextension path FMEs by Chinese EFL learners. The results can also provide some important implications for teaching and learning English coextension path FMEs.