Acquisition Of Chinese Tough Constructions By Indian CSL Learners

The Chinese tough construction(CTC)is a construction with unique syntactic and semantic features,i.e.the grammatical subject constitutes an inclusive patient thematic relationship with the embedded verb.Except for one corpus-based error study on the hao+V structure,rare attempts,to date,have been made to empirically investigate the L2 acquisition of the CTC.As a preliminary attempt,the present paper attempts to analyze the CTC from the perspective of construction coercion and then explores relevant syntactic and semantic constraints relating to the formation of such construction in order to find out the difficulty or the key in acquiring the CTC.Based on this,two main research questions are thus raised as follows:(1)Can the English-speaking CSL learners acquire the pure syntactic features of the CTC,i.e.the active form with passive meaning? If they can,are they sensitive towards the semantic constraints relating to the formation of the CTC?(2)In addition,what kinds of characteristics are displayed in the CSL learners' production performance of the CTC?In order to address the above questions,33 English-speaking Indian learners of Chinese with upper-intermediate proficiency level were recruited from Jinan University to participate in the study.In addition,33 educated Chinese native speakers also participated in the study as a control group.The two groups of participants were required to perform three tasks,i.e.the translation task,the cued production task and the acceptability judgment task.All the data collected from the three tasks were entered into and analyzed by the statistical package SPSS(Version 21.0).The major findings of the study are as follows:(1)as for the Indian participants,the difficulty in acquiring the CTC does not consist in syntactic features of the CTC,but in relevant semantic constraints posed by the CTC coercion;(2)the Indian participants had difficulty in acquiring the semantic constraints relating to the formation of the CTC.More specifically,the participants displayed weaker sensitivity towards the semantic features that can distinguish verbs that are allowed to enter the CTC from those that are not;they also displayed uncertainty about whether a peripheral semantic participant is allowed to enter the initial subject position of the CTC;(3)In addition,the participants generally adopted the avoidance strategy in their actual production.They preferred to use the V+O+ADJ.(the infinitival subject sentence)and the ADJ+V+O patterns(the incomplete expletive-like subject sentence)rather than use the O+ADJ.+V one(the CTC);they also tended to choose the rongyi type tough adjectives over the hao type ones in the production of the CTC.In the paper,the major reasons for the above errors are analyzed as follows:(1)construction coercion underlying the CTC involves interactions among different interfaces,thus processing the syntactic and semantic constraints between interfaces might especially pose difficulties;(2)the negative transfer of the English language;(3)the common characteristics of the general learning behavior.The above results and analyses provide new pedagogical implications.In the teaching of the CTC,attention should be paid to the cultivation of metonymic consciousness,in order to help the CSL learners better understand the motivation for syntactic and semantic constraints relating to the formation of the CTC and facilitate their mastery of such constraints.In addition,comparisons should be made between the ETC and the CTC,in order to help the learners understand the differences between them and to avoid the negative transfer.