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Chinese associating the Chinese lexical auxiliaries (–著 –zhe and –了 –le) with the decision among V-base, V-s, V-ing, and V-ed of English verbs. Moreover, for these Chinese counterparts of unaccusative existence/appearance verbs, whether or not Chinese grammatical patterns would also generate L1 Chinese transfer in the previous studies, which will be discussed in the next section.
2.3 Lexical Semantics-based and Corpus-based Differentiation (L1 Chinese)
After reviewing the previous studies as to the three L2 English-based syntactic differentiation (syntactic structures, thematic roles, and causative alternations within transitive versus intransitive alternations) and the additional features of perfectivity across languages, we found that the unaccusative verbs in L2 English and L1 Chinese would probably be different. The previous research on L2 English unaccusative verbs tended to emphasize the ways to distinguish the subclasses among unaccusative verbs (alternating versus non-alternating, such as The glass broke. versus The car accident happened.) or to compare them with unergative verbs (e.g., John walked.) through L2 English intransitive and transitive structures. However, from Liu’s (2007) lexical semantic perspective on Chinese auxiliary selections of perfectivity, collocations of unaccusative verbs seem also crucial for Chinese native speakers. Hence, based on this Chinese lexical semantic perfective, we then would stress the corpora applications from the previous studies of unaccusative existence/appearance verbs in L1 Chinese as well as the comparison of unaccusative verbs between L1 Chinese and L2 English.
In order to realize the application of corpora and collocations in unaccusative existence/appearance verbs, some studies could be reviewed as the references for
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comparing different verbs. In Wang and Chung (2009), the Chinese perfective auxiliary –了 –le in 發 生 了 fāshēngle ‘happen-le’, was found to have some relationship with the overuse of the grammatical form happened in one EFL learner corpus (the Language Training and Testing Center Learner Corpus), indicating that the L1 Chinese feature seems to have an effect on L2 English learning.
Tao (2003) applied the Emergent Grammar and corpora to compare the three frequent Chinese unaccussative existence/appearance verbs 出現 chūxiàn ‘appear’, 產生 chǎnshēng ‘produce’, and 發生 fāshēng ‘happen’ via different types of texts in Chinese native speaker corpora.6 The main findings of this study were that出現 chūxiàn ‘appear’ would be combined with unexpected objects, such as 革命 gémìng
‘revolution’, while 產生 chǎnshēng ‘produce’ was usually collocated with abstract ideas or emotional states, e.g., 反感 fǎngǎn ‘dissatisfaction.’ The collocations of發 生 fāshēng ‘happen’, on the other hand, would co-occur with undesirable qualities, e.g., 戰爭 zhànzhēng ‘war.’ From this study, the unaccusative existence/appearance verbs in L1 Chinese lexical items with synonymous meanings (e.g., 出現 chūxiàn
‘appear’, 產生 chǎnshēng ‘produce’, and 發生 fāshēng ‘happen’) appeared to collocate with different types of subjects in sentences. This suggests that to grasp the different uses of the unaccusative verbs for L1 Chinese native speakers is necessary, in that synonymous verbs could be analyzed and realized through the naturally used linguistic texts. With the differences among the verbs, we may also understand the frequent uses and collocations of each verb in L1 Chinese.
Other than Tao’s Emergent Grammar analysis on the three L1 Chinese
6 Emergent Grammar proposed by Hopper (1987, 1998) is a linguistic theory discussing the relationship between the discourse practice and the shape of human grammar. This grammar theory is associated with the communicative purpose of language uses, such as the pseudo-cleft construction (e.g., 我開的是英文課 Wǒkāidìshìyīngwénke ‘What I open is an English course’).
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unaccusative existence/appearance verbs, some corpus-based related studies intended to compare the differences between an English verb HAPPEN and its Chinese counterpart 發生 fāshēng ‘happen’ from syntactic and semantic properties (Zhang
& Liu, 2007; Wang, Y.-J., 2008). This research line centered on comparing one lexical concept across two languages, which revealed some different linguistic uses among languages and the different features of each languages would be transferred mutually when speakers learn an L2. For instance, Zhang and Liu (2007) analyzed HAPPEN and OCCUR in English as well as 發生 fāshēng ‘happen’ in Chinese based on the semantic prosody of the collocated subjects in sentences. The semantic prosody refers to the description of the way in which some neutral words can be perceived with positive or negative associations via frequent occurrences with particular collocations. For example, set in has a negative prosody and rot is a prime example for what is going to set in given in Sinclair’s (1991) study. The results showed that all of the three verbs possess different features in their collocated subjects.
HAPPEN and 發生 fāshēng ‘happen’ own negative subjects (e.g. A disaster happened. versus 犯罪行為發生 fànzuìxíngwéifāshēng ‘Criminal acts happen’), while OCCUR owns either negative or neutral subjects (e.g., Child abuse occurred. or This behavior occurs frequently.). These findings imply that learning difficulty in acquiring L2 unaccusative existence/appearance verbs would occur due to the differences among the semantic prosody.
A similar claim for L1 Chinese transfer through a corpus-based approach could be also found in Fu (2007) and Wang, Y.-J. (2008). The semantic prosody analysis for HAPPEN and its synonyms were also examined in Fu (2007) and Wang, Y.-J. (2008).
Fu discovered that the Chinese counterpart 發生 fāshēng ‘happen’ is frequently collocated with a positive subject, such 巨變發生 jùbiànfāshēng ‘The great change
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happened’ However, HAPPEN is frequently collocated with a negative subject, such as The war happened. Therefore, Fu assumed that the L1 positive semantic prosody of the subject for 發生 fāshēng ‘happen’ may probably be transferred to L2 English, which may be the cause of the L2 English misuses, such as The great changes have been happened. (Fu, 2007: 46).
While Fu claimed that HAPPEN and 發 生 fāshēng ‘happen’ would be frequently combined with the subjects belonging to different semantic prosodies (positive for Chinese and negative for English), yet Wang, Y.-J. (2008) proposed that both HAPPEN and 發 生 fāshēng ‘happen’ are frequently collocated with the subjects of the negative semantic prosody. In Wang’s study, the positive, neutral, and negative semantic prosodies of the subjects for both HAPPEN and 發生 fāshēng
‘happen’ were examined through corpora and statistical inferences. The results showed that there was no significant difference among the three types of subjects in terms of the semantic prosody between HAPPEN and 發生 fāshēng ‘happen.’
However, both unaccusative verbs are frequently collocated with the subjects of the negative semantic prosody, such as The car accident happened. or 車禍發生 chēhuòfāshēng, which indicates that using semantic features to compare HAPPEN and 發生 fāshēng ‘happen’ should be re-examined.
On the other hand, concerning the word order of the grammatical patterns (Verb+Noun versus Noun+Verb) in Chinese collocations, Fu noticed that the Chinese counterpart 發生 fāshēng of HAPPEN is used as a transitive or an intransitive verb, since Noun+發生 fāshēng ‘happen’ and發生 fāshēng ‘happen’+Noun are found to be frequently used in the Chinese native speaker corpus. These two particular Chinese grammatical patterns of 發生 fāshēng ‘happen’ were also discussed in Wang, Y.-J.’s (2008) study. Wang, Y.-J. further noted the differences of HAPPEN and 發生
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fāshēng ‘happen’ in terms of syntactic structures and semantic properties. With regard to the verb-noun collocations between the two verbs, for HAPPEN, it would be easy to analyze the subject-verb in ‘something HAPPEN’ However, in Chinese, the two Chinese grammatical patterns (Event-Noun+發生 fāshēng ‘happen’ e.g., 車禍發生 chēhuòfāshēng ‘The car accident happened’ or 發生 fāshēng ‘happen’+Event-Noun, e.g., 發生車禍 fāshēngchēhuò ‘The car accident happened’) could not be totally suitable for the subject-verb analysis similar to English. This is because that the event noun 車禍 chēhuò ‘car accident’ is neither the subject nor the object of the Chinese unaccusative verb發生 fāshēng ‘happen.’ This typical Chinese grammatical pattern V+N (e.g., 發生倒塌意外 fāshēngdǎotāyìwài ‘house tumbling accidents’) was also discussed in Shei (2005). Based on the findings of the previous studies above, it seems that the unacceptable V+N collocation of unaccusative existence/appearance verbs in English is frequently used in Chinese. Thus we would like to realize how this difference among the word order (e.g., 車禍發生 chēhuòfāshēng ‘The car accident happened’ versus發生車禍 fāshēngchēhuò ‘The car accident happened’) of verbs with nouns would influence L2 English processing for L1 Chinese learners. A summary of corpus-based studies in examining unaccusative existence/appearance verbs can be seen in Figure 2.1 below.
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Figure 2.1 Summaries of the Corpora Applications in Unaccusative Existence/appearance Verbs
After reviewing the application of corpora in unaccusative existence appearance verb studies, the errors made by L2 learners seem to be related to learners’
L1 perfectivity auxiliary selections (the imperfective auxiliary –著 -zhe versus the perfective auxiliary –了 –le) and grammatical patterns (V+N versus N+V). Therefore, it means that the problem of how to relate the corpora to the solution of error analysis in second language acquisition has not been tackled yet, which is also worth noticing.
This discussion could broaden the function of identifying the different uses among unaccusative existence/appearance verbs and answer the question of the how L2 learners acquire this verb type.
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2.4 Error Analysis of Unaccusative Existence/appearance Verbs
With respect to the common error types of unaccusative existence/appearance verbs in SLA, two main error types (overpassivization and transitivization) were usually discussed in previous studies. In order to point out that these two error types are frequently made by L2 learners in using unaccusative verbs, different research methods were utilized to elicit the possible reasons for realizing the errors.
Many researchers compared the frequency of the two error types of unaccusative verbs with that of unergative verbs or other verb types. In terms of the first error type, overpassivization, Yip (1990) conducted a grammatical judgment task to investigate the acquisition of unaccusative verbs (e.g., break) and unergative verbs (e.g., laugh). The results showed that the L2 English learners tended to reject the correct sentence of unaccusative verbs in the intransitive syntactic structure, e.g., The glass broke during the earthquake. and accept the incorrect sentence in the passivized structure, e.g., *What was happened here?. However, L2 English learners did not accept the passivized structure of unergative verbs, e.g., *He was walked to school.
The authors then claimed that the reason for the overpassivization of unaccusative verbs is probably because L2 learners might assume that unaccusative verbs were derived from the transitive syntactic structures. However, not all L2 learners can commit the overpassivization error. Shan and Yuan (2008) investigated the grammatical judgment tasks between unergative and unaccusative verbs for L2 Chinese learners. The most crucial finding of their study was that the overpassivization error was seldom found in acquiring the L2 Chinese unaccusative verbs, which contrasted with the finding of L2 English in Yip’s research. To explain the phenomenon of the less frequent overpassivization errors in L2 Chinese, they proposed that the possibility for L2 learners to make overpassivization errors had
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something to do with the features of L2. Different from the obligatory English passive marker BE-V in The letter has been sent., the Chinese passive marker, 被 bèi
‘be-v’, could be optional in Chinese passive sentences, such as 信(被)寄出了 xìn(bèi)jìchūle ‘letter (be-v) send-le.’ For this reason, L2 Chinese learners appeared to make less overpassivization errors for unaccusative verbs than L2 English learners did.
Ju (2000), on the other hand, utilized the grammatical judgment tasks to compare the differences of overpavissivization between the alternating versus non-alternating unaccusative verbs. The result showed that different unaccusative verbs would cause various degrees of learning difficulty. In this study, Ju found that the alternating unaccusative verbs (e.g., break) would cause higher learning difficulty than non-alternating unaccusative verbs (e.g., happen), since the alternating unaccusative verbs have an external cause in the causative alternation (discussed previously in section 2.1.3). However, the groups of unaccusative verbs in either alternating verbs (e.g., break versus open) or non-alternating unaccusative verbs (e.g., happen versus occur) with closely related meanings in terms of the learning difficulty and frequency of the overpassivization error could not be found in her study.
Balcon (1997), on the other hand, adopted the grammatical judgment tasks, along with the cloze tests, to compare unaccusative verbs with or without transitive alternations between the acceptability in grammar and the actual uses in cloze tests for L2 English learners. The result indicated that the subjects in the study accepted and used the be+V-ed/V-en patterns in unaccustive verbs, while frequency of the unaccusative verbs used in the cloze test was lower. The author then pointed that L2 English learners may probably accept all of the be+V-ed/V-en patterns in the grammatical judgment tasks, but these patterns may not be used frequently in the
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cloze tests. In addition to the numerous studies adopting psycholinguistic experiments to investigate unaccusative existence/appearance verbs, some research analyzed the overpassivization error through corpora.
The most representative corpus-based studies in the overpassivization error were the two studies by Oshita (2000, 2001). The author intended to utilize learner corpora to investigate the overpassivization error of unaccusative verbs through different syntactic structures, such as the There+unaccusative verbs structure (There happened a car accident.). In these two studies, he also attempted to generalize some possible explanation of this error type from different linguistic theories. The result of the study concluded that the NP movement of the sentences for unaccusative verbs (arrived Mary Mary arrived) would be the most plausible account of L2 learning difficulty. However, other error types of the unaccusative verbs in different syntactic structures, such as *To avoid this thing happen, we should always keep clearly in a good range., could be hardly found in Oshita’s studies. A summary of the studies on overpassivization error in unaccusative existence/appearance verbs can be seen in Figure 2.2 below.
Figure 2.2 Summaries of the Studies on the Overpassivization in
Unaccusative Existence/appearance Verbs
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In addition to the first common error of unaccusative existence/appearance verbs (the overpassivization error), the second common error (the transitivization error) will be introduced. With respect to the tranisitivization error, Lozano and Mendikoetxea (2008) focused on the postverbal subjects (e.g., *It happened the car accident.) in the L2 English produced by the L1 Spanish learners. The result showed that the reason of transitivization errors for Spanish learners would be due to the similar patterns found in Spanish (e.g., Ha IIegado Juan. (has arrived Juan) ‘Juan has arrived’ in Spanish). However, whether the similar V+N grammatical patterns in Chinese (cf. 發生車禍 fāshēngchēhuò ‘The car accident happened’ in Fu (2007) &
Shei (2005) in section 2.3) could also be another reason for L1 Chinese learners to make the transitivization errors were seldom discussed in the previous studies. Liu (2000) attempted to use the grammatical judgment tasks to compare the acceptability for the [±Animacy] and [±Human] features of the subjects co-occurring with the unaccustive verbs. Some Chinese lexical features, such as the transitivized patterns 張三發生了車禍 zhāngsānfāshēnglechēhuò (zhāngsān happen-le car accident)
‘An car accident happened to zhāngsān’ (p. 38) of unaccusative existence/appearance verbs have been taken into consideration when the author designed the stimuli, e.g., *The arrival of the President happened something we could never expect before. (p. 74) in the grammatical judgment tasks. However, no corpus-based evidence of frequency could be found in this study. Furthermore, the relationship between L2 English transitivization errors and L1 Chinese lexical transfer was not discussed in Liu’s study, which is necessary for a profound investigation.
Aside from the studies mentioned above which focused only on overpassivization and transitivization errors, Wang and Chung (2009) adopted a quantitative corpus-based study to analyze the L2 English unaccusative verb
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HAPPEN through the Language Training and Testing Center (the LTTC) Learner Corpus. This study utilized a quantitative approach to calculate the percentages of the five most highly frequent errors. They analyzed all of the error types of HAPPEN and the results were summarized in Table 2.1.
TABLE 2.1 Examples of the Five Error Types (Wang & Chung, 2009)
Error Type Freq. (%) Erroneous Sentence ExamplesType 1-Mismatches in subject-verb agreement
15 (45.45%) *Why the 現象 happened?
Type 2- Mismatches in infinitive usages
8 (24.24%) *But you may say what is the reason cause this happen?
Type 3- Mismatches in present participle usages
5 (15.15%) *To avoid this thing happen, we should always keep clearly in a good range.
Type 4-Overpassivization
4 (12.12%) *First problem is always happened. When you eat noddles you will find glass bluring
Type 5-Transitivization 1 (3.03%) *This situation I have never happened before!
Total 33 (100%)
From Table 2.1, five error types were found in HAPPEN. Among the five, the overpassivization and transitivization errors are less frequent than the mismatches in subject-verb agreement, infinitive usages, and participle usages. However, the similarity among the five errors is that the grammatical form happened with higher frequency could be found in most of the error types. The authors assumed that the overuse of happened may have some effect on all of the error types of HAPPEN.
Nonetheless, there still remained some puzzles in this study. The first one is whether
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other unaccusative existence/appearance verbs, such as OCCUR or APPEAR, would also be overused in the V-ed form by L2 English learners. On the other hand, even though the research assumed that there might be a close relationship between the grammatical form happened and its Chinese counterpart with the Chinese perfective auxiliary發生了 fāshēngle ‘happen-le’, no empirical acceptability judgment task was conducted to investigate the L1 Chinese transfer to L2 English, which is worth discussing deeply in the present thesis. In Chapter Three as to the corpora analysis, we will re-categorize these five error types so as to clearly divide them into a larger scale of error classifications.
2.5 Gaps of the Previous Research
From the discussion of the previous four sections, we found that many scholars generally centered on two points. The first is the different uses among unaccusative existence/appearance verbs through L2 English-based syntactic perspectives in transitive versus intransitive structures, perfectivity (in L2 English and L1 Chinese), and L1 Chinese lexical semantic analysis via corpora. The second is the error analysis of unaccusative verbs through either empirical psycholinguistic experiments or corpora. However, there are some gaps in previous studies of unaccusative verbs.
First, there seemed to be little research integrating the L2 English syntactic-based perspectives with L1 Chinese grammatical patterns (e.g., 車禍發生 chēhuòfāshēng
‘The car accident happened’ versus 發生車禍 fāshēngchēhuò ‘The car accident happened’) on the lexical semantic perspective, which is paramount because the relationship between L2 English and L1 Chinese could be elicited to explain the causes of frequent error types of unaccusative verbs.
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Second, for the research methods regarding the error analysis in the related unaccusative verb studies, generally these two common errors (overpassivization and transitivization errors) were usually examined through either empirical psycholinguistic experiments (e.g., the grammatical or acceptability judgment tasks) or the corpus-based approach. However, fewer studies could be found to integrate the two research methods. According to Gilquin and Gries (2009), the two types of research methods, corpora versus psycholinguistic experiments, have their indispensable advantages. For corpora, the data were extracted from natural linguistic contexts, which would be much more objective in language analysis. As for psycholinguistic experiments, they can be utilized to investigate the less frequent linguistic data in corpora. Additionally, the variables among the linguistic data could be controlled systematically, which would also be one of the criteria to verify corpora
Second, for the research methods regarding the error analysis in the related unaccusative verb studies, generally these two common errors (overpassivization and transitivization errors) were usually examined through either empirical psycholinguistic experiments (e.g., the grammatical or acceptability judgment tasks) or the corpus-based approach. However, fewer studies could be found to integrate the two research methods. According to Gilquin and Gries (2009), the two types of research methods, corpora versus psycholinguistic experiments, have their indispensable advantages. For corpora, the data were extracted from natural linguistic contexts, which would be much more objective in language analysis. As for psycholinguistic experiments, they can be utilized to investigate the less frequent linguistic data in corpora. Additionally, the variables among the linguistic data could be controlled systematically, which would also be one of the criteria to verify corpora