L2Chinese Acquisition Of "NP₁+V+gei+NP₂+NP₃"

It has been proposed that Chinese Transfer Sentence can be realized by by fourdifferent sentences, namely,“NP₁+V+gei+NP₂+NP₃”,“NP1+V+NP3+gei+NP2”,“NP₁+V+NP₂+NP₃”,“NP₁+gei+NP₂+V+NP₃”. The verbs allowed in the first syntacticstructure should have the semantic characteristic as [+give,-receive,-make]. Inanother word, it is justified to say, that “NP₁+V+gei+NP₂+NP₃” and the verb includesan internal semantic-syntactic interface. The study reported in this paper was to findout whether the semantic-syntactic interface could be appropriately represented inEnglish-speaking Learner’ s L2syntax of Chinese and ultimately acquired by thelearners. In order to answer this question, we conducted an empirical study of aphenomenon involving the semantic-syntax interface by presenting theEnglish-speaking Chinese learners with two tasks, an oral picture-description task anda sentence-acceptability judgment task. By the statistical analysis of the data collected,we could examine the Interface hypothesis in the perspective of the acquisition ofChinese as L2. The results indicate that the syntax-semantci interface is not acquirablein L2Chinese grammar by English-speaking learners, they not only allow “mai （sell）”in the structure, but also allow the other two different kinds of verbs to make badsentences. And the acquisition does not proceed in a linear fashion.