Effects Of L2 On L1:Evidence From The Acquisition Of English Tag Questions

The effects of second language (L2) on the first (L1) refer to phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantic or even conceptual changes of L2 learners in their L1 in the process of second language acquisition (SLA). Recently, there have been a great number of studies dealing with the effects of L1 on the L2. However, only a few have been investigated in terms of the effects of L2 on the L1, which is especially true in the domestic academia. Some limitations of previous studies are summarized in the following four aspects,1) the target languages of the previous studies are alphabetical, but not ideographical; 2) most of the previous studies take the L2 rather than the L1 as dominant language context; 3) previous studies are basically targeted on written syntactic structures rather than oral ones, and at semantic level, many have been done in lexical semantic but not in sentential semantic field; and 4) domestic studies have been done from descriptive angles, but not quantitative ones.Given the aforementioned status quo, the present study, under the umbrella of Multi-competence Theory and with polarity of Chinese/English tag questions as the breakthrough, attempted to tentatively explore the effects of the acquiring English syntactic and semantic knowledge (L2) on their corresponding knowledge of Chinese (L1) in China. Specifically, there are basically two research questions,1) are there any effects of the acquisition of English tag questions on their corresponding Chinese ones at syntactical level? If yes, what are they? 2) are there any effects of the acquisition of English tag questions on their corresponding Chinese ones at semantic level? If yes, what are they?211 subjects were divided into two groups in this study,51 English majors and 160 non-English majors. Grammatical acceptability task and assurance-doubt task were employed to detect the evidence of L2 effects on L1 at syntactic and semantic level, respectively. Grammatical acceptability task involved three types of tag question based on their mood, declarative, imperative and controlled mood, and the sentences of each mood had four kinds of polarity match in terms of the match between the declarative part and tag part of each tag question (positive-positive, negative-negative, positive-negative, and negative-positive), while assurance-doubt task only covered two types (declarative and controlled declarative). All the data collected were input into SPSS (18.00) for statistical analysis. This study obtained the following findings,1) acquiring English tag questions implements some effects on grammatical acceptability judgment of Chinese tag questions at syntactic level, that is, the judgment is influenced when the match between the declarative part and the tag part of a tag question is both negative for the three types of mood (the declarative, imperative and controlled declarative mood) tested; 2) acquiring English tag questions also affects the semantic assurance-doubt judgment of Chinese tag questions. To be specific, the judgment is affected when the polarity match between the declarative part of a tag question is in negative and the tag part in positive for the two types of mood (the declarative and controlled declarative mood) tested.