There has been considerable research devoted to analyzing linguistic characteristics of RVCs. However, only a few studies have been done on RVCs in the field of SLA. Two most recent studies are Guo (2003) and Chen (2004), reviewed below.
Guo (2003), in the investigation of how Japanese learners of Mandarin Chinese would acquire RVCs, finds out that the lack of structural correspondence between Japanese and Mandarin may pose some problems for Japanese-speaking learners in
learning Mandarin RVCs. The learning difficulty is exemplified in (41):
(41) * Guo laoshi de zuoye wan-le, Guo teacher DE homework finish-LE,
Li laoshi de zuoye haimei wan.
Li teacher De homework negation finish
‘I am finished with Miss Guo’s homework, but I haven’t finished Miss Li’s.’
(Guo 2003:75)
As Guo (2003) puts it, in Japanese the result part of an event is more important than the action part, so the action part is often left unexpressed. For instance, in Japanese, [終おつた] ‘finish’ can be used to express the notion of completion for many actions.
This may imply that in the description of an event composed of both an action and a result, the Japanese speaker only needs to describe the result part. In contrast, in Mandarin Chinese, the action-result event is expressed with the RVC, formed with an action verb or a stative verb and a resultative morpheme. Due to the difference between Chinese and Japanese in the event expression, the author suggests that to an L2 learner whose L1 lacks a similar compound verb which can be used to describe the action-result event, like Japanese, the learning task of the Mandarin RVC can be overwhelming.
Gao’s research, however, is considered insufficient in that the results simply reveal an observation that Japanese learners usually have difficulty producing the action verb in the V1 position in Act-R and Sem-R RVCs. She does not show whether learners’ performance on Sta-R RVC reflects such a tendency. What is more, the author fails to show if the grammatical properties of RVCs, presented in Section 2.2, would pose difficulty in acquisition to the Japanese learners since as our analyses of RVCs indicate, RVCs can be best characterized with these properties.
Chen’s (2004) study is a corpus-based. In the study, she concludes that Mandarin
RVCs that do not appear in the textbooks pose great problems for the L2
English-speaking learners. As an illustration, consider examples (42) and (43):
(42) * nage erzi nian quanbu naben shu, that CL son read whole that CL book keshi heishi kan bu dong.
but still read negation understand
‘Although that son read the whole book, he still could not understand it.’
(43) * nage kelian de nanshen zuotian bei that CL poor DE boy yesterday passive tade didi she –le.
he GEN brother shoot –LE
‘That poor boy was shot by his little brother yesterday.’
(Chen 2004:93) As the underlined parts in (42) and (43) suggest, the learners have difficulty learning the RVCs nian-wan ‘read-finish’ and she-si ‘shoot-die’. Chen’s explanation for the learning problem is simply that the learners have not learned the RVCs at the time of testing, so the production such RVCs are difficult for these learners.
It is also important to point out that sentences (42) and (43) seem to provide evidence for our analysis on the cross-linguistic difference between the specification of completion in Mandarin and English. As mentioned in 2.3.2, in English, the completion of a closed event is covertly implied in the meaning of the main verb in a perfective sentence; but in Mandarin the notion of completion, in general, is overtly
expressed with the resultative morpheme of the RVC. This has the implication that English L2 learners may have problem learning Mandarin RVCs. In other words, this difference in the specification of completion between Mandarin and English may account for why these English learners produce awkward sentences like (42) and (43).
2.6 Summary
In this chapter, the basic properties and previous studies of the RVC construction have been examined. We first investigate the possible candidates that may serve as the components in RVCs and find out that the RVC can be formed with an Activity, a Semelfactive, or a State verb and a resultative morpheme. Then, we divide the RVCs into three distinct categories — Activity-Result, Semelfactive-Result and State-Result RVCs — according to the semantic properties of the constituents. We also present the essential features of RVCs and make cross-linguistic comparisons between RVCs and English verbs with the goal of discovering some similarities and differences between RVCs and English Accomplishment, Achievement and Stative verbs. It is found that the Act-R and Sem-R RVCs are similar to the English Accomplishments in that they both consist of an action and a result. In addition, the comparison reveals that the temporal features of RVCs are the same as those of English Achievements.
Specifically, the (action-result) RVCs and Achievements are semantically instantaneous. Because RVCs do not include the action aspect denoting the feature of
duration in their aspectual meaning, they are incompatible with durative grammatical labels. Moreover, like Achievements, the result component constitutes the semantic focus of the RVCs. Similar to Achievements, which do not include a non-detachable process (or an action) as part of their meaning, the ambiguity with almost does not appear in the RVC/Achievement sentence. As for Sta-R RVCs, they have the same linguistic features as do Act-R and Sem-R RVCs except that the meanings between their constituents indicate a state-result relation.
With regard to the empirical research of the RVC construction, Guo (2003) found that Japanese learners of Chinese have difficulty producing RVCs. According to Guo, owing to the fact that in Japanese the action part of a telic event is often left unexpressed, the production of the RVC, consisting of both an action verb and a resultative morpheme, pose a serious problem to the Japanese L2 learners. Moreover, Chen (2004) reports that English learners of Chinese are weak at producing RVCs.
She also observes that the learners are less familiar with the RVCs whose component morphemes are new to them than with those whose component morphemes they have learned already.
Based on the linguistic properties of RVCs and the similarities and differences between RVCs and English verbs, this study investigates the L2 acquisition of Mandarin RVCs by English L2 learners to see whether they have full understanding of
the semantic properties of RVCs in general and whether their acquisition varies according to the three RVC types. Moreover, we are interesting in knowing if the learners will carry over their L1 knowledge into the L2 learning of RVCs.
Chapter Three
Methodology
This chapter is dedicated to the experimental design of the present study. Section 3.1 describes the subjects in the experiment. The methodology and instrument are introduced in sections 3.2. Section 3.3 presents the procedure of the experiment, including the pilot study, and the type of statistics employed in our data analysis. A summary is given in Section 3.4.
3.1 Subjects
A total of 40 English-speaking adults learning Mandarin at the Mandarin Training Center (MTC) of National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei participated in this experiment. The selection of the subjects from the MTC was based on the consideration that they attended Mandarin classes regularly--two hours a day, 10 hours per week with Mandarin-speaking teachers. On the basis of their performance on the MTC placement test, the 40 subjects were evenly (i.e., n=20) divided into two proficiency groups and labeled as Mid and High. Besides, the current study included 20 native speakers of Mandarin who were undergraduates at one of the universities in Taipei. The purpose of recruiting the Chinese speakers was to establish a base line of information or norm which could then be compared with the performance of the two English-speaking groups. Tables 3-1 and 3-2 present the personal information of the
subjects and language background of the L2 learners, respectively:
Table 3-1. Personal information of the subjects Subject
Gender Mid High Control
Male 14 15 8
Female 6 5 12
Total 20 20 20
Table 3-2. L2 learners’ language background
Mid (n=20) High (n=20)
Subject Language background
Mean SD Mean SD
Total length of Chinese learning 1.73 0.50 3.5 1.09
As can be seen in Table 3-1, the ratios of gender in the experimental group and the control group were not equal: while the mid group had 14 male and 6 female and the high group 15 male and 5 female, the control group included 8 male and 12 female. The discrepancy was not significant since the focus of this study was on the performance of learners with a difference in their L2 proficiency. In addition, as Table 3-2 indicates, the number of years of exposure to L2 is 1.73 for the mid group and 3.5, for the high group. Though the standard deviation for the L2 learning experience of the high group was larger than that of the mid group, it was considered insignificant because the L2 subjects were chosen on the basis of their overall proficiency in
Chinese, evaluated by the MTC.24 According to the admission and class offerings of the MTC, our subjects in the mid group had an average of 1 year Chinese learning experience at the MTC and those in the high group 2 years. Further, the L2 learners in the mid group were Beginner-High, Intermediate-Low and Intermediate learners who were studying one of the following books at the time of testing: Practical Audio-Visual Chinese II, Practical Audio-Visual Chinese III, Taiwan Today and Chinese Folk Tales. The subjects in the high group included Intermediate-High,
Advanced-Low and Advanced-High learners, and they were studying these books:
Mini Radio Plays, News Readings II, Thought and Society: an Advanced Spoken Level
Text or Various Chinese Newspapers and/or Periodicals. It is also important to note
that the target structure -- the Mandarin RVC -- is introduced late, in Lesson 21 of the learners’ first textbook Practical Audio-Visual Chinese I. To assure the participants’
awareness of the target structure, onlythose who had finished studying Lesson One in Practical Audio-Visual Chinese II at the time of testing were selected to be the subjects of the present study.