On Acquisition of Verb-Object Construction in Second Language Chinese Learners of English

Ya-Wen Hsu

《臺大華語文教學研究》 1期 (2013/08) Pp. 127-147

https://doi.org/10.6664/NTUTCSL.201308_(1).0005

並列摘要

Inspiring from a foreigner's post on the Facebook, who put the suffix- ing between the verb nian 'study' 唸 and the object Shuo Shi 'master degree' 碩士 to compose a sentence Wo Zheng Zai Nian-ing Shuo Shi 'I' m working on my master degree.' This paper therefore aims to investigate how verbobject construction behaves since the sentence demonstrates above actually can be put in another way, which might be a more nature one to most of the Taiwanese, as in Wo Zheng Zai Nian Shuo Shi-ing 我正在唸碩士 ing 'I' m working on my master degree.' The different sentence production of verb-object construction between Taiwanese and second language Chinese learner of English native speakers thus became the topic of this paper. It should be noted beforehand that the verb-object constructions here refer to the two-morpheme-composed words, e.g. dan Xin 'worry' 擔心. By administrating two grammatical judgment tasks, the result shows that in all the conditions, the subjects in target group are more likely to go through the syntactical process when they are dealing with verb-object constructions. On the contrary, the subjects in control group, i.e. Taiwanese, are more likely processing verb-object constructions semantically. In this case, L1 influence can be used to serve as the plausible explanation to account for why the subjects in target group have higher acceptance rate in separated usage of verb-object constructions than control group's subjects do. Furthermore, the results of the tasks also show that the verb-object construction with higher word frequency is more likely to go through the process of lexicalization which will further influence the transitivity of the verb-object constructions. In other word, if the subjects prefer united usage of verb-object constructions, they will tend to accept the united form of verb-object constructions and do not care whether a verb-object construction in the sentence is transitive or intransitive itself. The preferred usage of verb-object constructions thus can be observed.

並列關鍵字

second language acquisition ； verb-object construction ； L1 influence ； lexicalization