Material

國

立 政 治 大 學

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N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

questionnaire. All subjects finish the experiment without any time limit. 6 subjects were discarded because too many items were not answered in their test sheet, just 117 reliable subjects in total involving the study.

3.2 Materials

Cross-sectional quantitative methods are adopted in the study. The study was

designed to elicit the subjects’ response to English to test the understanding of

non-alternating unaccusatives interaction with alternating unaccusatives, passives, and subject animacy. There are two tasks in the study, GJ and CET. GJ aims to investigate their understanding of alternating, non-alternating unaccusatives, and passives while CET is used to test the use of non-alternating unaccusatives by observing the voice forms differences from Chinese to English. Also, the variance of subjects with animacy is concerned in the task.

3.2.1 GJ Task

There are 24 sentences in total in the task made up of three types of verbs, 8 for alternating unaccusative verbs, 8 for non-alternating unaccusative verbs, and 8 for passive verbs in English. Each given sentence consists of active voice and passive voice. The different voice forms of the verbs in every sentence are underlined for subjects to check. If subjects judge the sentence grammatical then they mark the answer with a circle ○, and leave no mark if the sentence is ungrammatical. Also, each

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verb will be assigned with animate and inanimate subject in order to test animacy effect.

(29) The house (remained/was remained) cool.

(30) He (remained/was remained) cool.

The subjects of (29) and (30) are inanimate and animate respectively. Thus, the animacy of four alternating unaccusatives creates 8 sentences and the animacy of four non-alternating unaccusatives creates 8 sentences as well. On the other hand, 8

passive verbs create 8 sentences, 4 for animate subjects and 4 for inanimate subjects.

The verbs of alternating and non-alternating unaccusatives, and passives used in the GJ task are displayed in the following table.

Table 1: Verbs of alternating and non-alternating unaccusatives, and passives in GJ

task

The different numbers between unaccusatives and passives are because passive verbs usually do not occur in a sentence with animate/inanimate subject. For example,

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

it is inappropriate to arrange an inanimate subject in the passive verb tease since the verb usually collocates with an animate subject. Likewise, put an inanimate subject to the verb attract is inappropriate as well. In addition, arranging the animacies of the subjects to a single passive verb might not represent participants’ knowledge on passives. The following table is the example of the verb buy collocating with an animate subject.

Table 2: The example of animate subject collocating with active/passive voices

He (bought/was bought)

For example, as the above table shows, if participants choose active voice in the verb buy collocating with an animate subject He (i.e. in the case participants consider He bought correct), it is not because they know or they do not know how to use

passives, but because they know the intransitive usage of the verb buy. On the other hand, the reason for giving up He was bought might be because the semantic meaning of the sentence is against common sense. Therefore, for passive verbs, we arrange 8 different passive verbs in the task.

Among these three kinds of verbs, all tested items are randomly distributed, which can prevent participants find the patters of the verbs.

3.2.2 CET Task

There are sixteen Chinese topic-comment structure sentences with active voice

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displayed in the CET task, in which subjects were asked to translate into English.

Besides, since the test aims to test the use of non-alternating unaccusatives, half of the sentences are non-alternating unaccusatives while the others are passive verbs.

Therefore, eight of sentences should be presented with active voice whereas, eight with passive voice. Animate and inanimate subjects are assigned to each unaccusative verb and passive verb in order to test animacy effect, examples shown as follows.

Table3: The sample of CET subjects respectively. Item 1 and 5 should be translated in active voice in English while item 4 and 11, passives. In item 5, the hint arrive is provided so that subjects would not substitute arrive with reach or get to, which do not belong to unaccusatives.

Table4: The numbers and distribution of test items in GJ and CET tasks Alternating Unacc. Non-alternating

Unacc.

Passive Verbs Total

Animate Inanimate Animate Inanimate Animate Inanimate

GJ 4 4 4 4 4 4 24

CET 4 4 4 4 16

Considering that subjects might involve the problem of unknown vocabulary words, they are provided with unknown vocabulary list in order to exclude vocabulary

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factor. Subjects could look up the words they were not familiar with from the list when they were doing tasks. The list is shown as follows.

Table 5. The unknown vocabulary words list

All the tested verbs and animate/inanimate subjects in GJ and CET are

randomized in the test sheet in order to exclude the counter balanced effects. For the groups of different proficiency, each group is represented by a letter: Group A for low proficiency learners, Group B for low-intermediate learners, Group C for intermediate learners, and Group D for high-intermediate learners.