Author(s)

Anni Wang ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China

Corresponding Author

Anni Wang

ABSTRACT

Unaccusatives pose difficulties for L2 English learners from various L1 backgrounds, and alternating unaccusatives, or unaccusatives that participate in causative alternation, are a type of unaccusatives that are highly focused upon in language acquisition research. This study aims to investigate how well advanced Chinese EFL learners have acquired the use of alternating unaccusatives in terms of linguistic competence. Specifically, this study aims to answer the following question: in terms of linguistic competence, to what extent have advanced Chinese EFL learners acquired the use of English alternating unaccusative verbs? In other words, has their interlanguage restructured accordingly, or do they also struggle with acquiring the rule of unaccusatives? This study adopted a quantitative approach. Through the application of an acceptability judgement task, the study collected acceptability ratings of 40 advanced Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers each on 6 causative constructions featuring unaccusatives. The acceptability judgement task was administered via Gorilla.com. Data from Chinese participants were collected in person, and data from English native speakers were collected via Prolific.com. After collection, data were analysed using R. The findings revealed that advanced Chinese EFL learners accepted both structures of causative alternation, though they showed a preference for the transitive structure over the intransitive one, unlike English native speakers who accepted both equally. Overpassivization was observed in not only Chinese EFL learners but also English speakers. Moreover, Chinese EFL learners accepted the Make-NP-V_{PastParticiple} construction, which English native speakers strongly rejected. This suggests Chinese EFL learners undergoing the restructuring phase in their interlanguage regarding the unaccusative rule despite their acceptance of other unaccusative sentence forms. Overall, Chinese EFL learners demonstrate proficiency in various grammatical structures compared to English native speakers, yet their acceptance of Make-NP-V_PP indicates incomplete acquisition of the unaccusative rule.

KEYWORDS

Unaccusatives; causative alternation; causative constructions; Chinese EFL learners; acceptability judgement task

CITE THIS PAPER

Anni Wang, Chinese EFL Learners' Acquisition of Alternating Unaccusatives in Lexical and Periphrastic Causative Structures. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2024) Vol. 7: 106-114. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2024.070516.

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