5. Conclusion
5.3 Limitations and Suggestions…
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(37) Bing rong-hua LE Ice melt LE ‘The ice melted.’
From the above example, semantic passive with a form in active voice is common in topic-comment structures in Chinese. That is, the NP-V word order with semantic passive in Chinese would help L2 learners avoid making overpassivization once they do form mapping. Additionally, L2 learners have to be reminded that
non-alternating unaccusatives involve the verbs of existence and appearance (Levin &
Hovav, 1995). Consequently, for the verbs of existence and appearance, L2 learners could map the NP-V word order from Chinese into English to achieve the use of non-alternating unaccusatives in English.
5.3 Limitations and Suggestions
In the study, there are some limitations and suggestions that need to be
mentioned for further research. First, students in Taiwan began to learn English at the first grade in elementary school. They had received lots of English input and might have learned some structures at the time. Thus, some participants might have learned passives in elementary school even if passives are introduced at nine grades. In the way, the proficiency of Group A in our study might not match our expectation well.
Likewise, cram schools are commonly seen in Taiwan. Students could learn preview
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lessons and even learn more advanced courses there. Even if we had classified their English proficiency based on their ages, this may not separate students’ proficiency accurately. One way to solve the problems is to give participants a pretest to make sure their proficiency and exclude the students who had learned advanced English in cram schools. In the light, the experiment in the study will be more accurate and reliable.
Second, using alternating unaccusatives to test animacy effect would be better than using non-alternating unaccusatives. In the experimental design of animacy effect, Ideally, the tested items should be one sentence with animacy subject and one sentence with inanimate subject; besides, it would be better if both sentences belong to the same verb.
Table 21: Examples of the study of animacy effect by using alternating unaccusatives in CET task
Chinese input English equivalent
鋼鐵人融化了 _______________________________
冰融化了 _______________________________
In the above table, the only difference in Chinese input is the subjects: one with animate subject and the other one with inanimate subject. It would be more
convincing to say animacy effect influence voice forms when participants use active
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voice in 鋼鐵人融化了 and use passive voice in 冰融化了. The disadvantage of
using non-alternating unaccusatives is that non-alternating unaccusative verbs are not allowed to be presented in passive voice. Thus, the reason for those who do not choose non-alternating unaccusatives with passives might be because they had not seen the usage before.
Table 22: Examples of the study of animacy effect by using non-alternating unaccusatives in CET task
Chinese input English equivalent
這隻貓咪動了 _______________________________
球彈起來了 _______________________________
As the above table shows, participants might not use The cat was moved in 這隻 貓咪動了 not because of animacy effect but because of input shortage of this
sentence. Therefore, a huge frequency effect might affect participants’ judgment when they are given non-alternating unaccusatives. Alternating unaccusatives would be a better choice for testing animacy effect in CET task.
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I. Grammaticality judgment: In each sentence, please circle one/two of the two answers so that the sentence is grammatically correct.
e.g. Many people (invited/were invited) to the party.
1. The boat (sank/was sunk).
2. He (remained/was remained) cool.
3. The window (broke/was broken).
4. The house (remained/was remained) cool.
5. A black box (emerged/was emerged) 6. The room (cleaned/was cleaned).
7. A bus (vanished/was vanished) 8. The book (bought/was bought).
9. The stone (rolled down/was rolled down) the lane.
10. I (reminded/was reminded) to turn off the light.
11. The monster (melted/was melted) 12. The picture (appeared/was appeared) 13. The iron man (broke/was broken)
14. The first creature (discovered/was discovered) 15. The ice (melted/was melted)
16. A cat (emerged/was emerged)
17. The new product (invented/was invented).
18. A panda (appeared/was appeared)
19. He (rolled down/was rolled down) the lane.
20. The room (booked/was booked).
21. The old man (vanished/was vanished) 22. He (teased/was teased).
23. The dog (sank/was sunk).
24. I (attracted/was attracted).
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II. Chinese to English test: Please translate the following sentences into English equivalents.