The L2 Acquisition Of Chinese Ergative Verbs

Based on the relevant research of the Unaccusative Hypothesis and the definition criterion of ergative verb in Mandarin Chinese proposed by Zeng,this research conducts the empirical study among Intermediate and advanced Chinese learner to explore the acquisition rules of Chinese ergative verbs.It is investigated by a cross-sectional approach using a writing production task and a grammaticality judgement task.Fifty L2 learners from Shanghai Jiaotong University participated in this investigation.According to the results of this investigation,on the whole,ergative verbs acquisition is still a problem for the Chinese learners who have achieved the intermediate and advanced.Some learners could not correctly use the ergative verbs and successfully produce accurate sentences containing these verbs.As far as the factors affecting the learning,the types of ergative verbs and the sentence patterns may affect the learners’ learning performance.On the contrary,the context has little influence on learners.The materials produced by the subjects show that learners may recognize Chinese ergative verbs as transitive verbs.Therefore,these materials provide evidence for the Transitivity Hypothesis which could explain the causes of Chinese learners’ errors.Finally,this study takes teaching Chinese as a foothold and puts forward three teaching suggestions:1.Attaching importance to the teaching of ergative verbs 2.Highlighting the difficulties of ergative verbs 3.Helping students distinguish between the ergative verbs and intransitive verbs.