There are several aspects and various issues for investigating the L2 acquisition
of Mandarin RVCs which failed to be covered in this study. First, this research adopts a grammaticality judgment task and a sentence interpretation task to tap English learners’ grammatical knowledge of RVCs. However, a long term observation or a production test may collect more data of how RVCs are used by the learners. Second, this study is far from complete in that we only surveyed L2 learners whose first language is English. L2 learners of different L1 backgrounds can be included to see if the L2 acquisition of Mandarin RVCs varies from learner to learner.
Finally, in the investigation of how an RVC sentence was interpreted by the
learners, we found that the interpretations of sentences with the Act-R and Sem-R RVCs differed from sentence to sentence. As indicated in Section 4.3, our explanation for this is that the L2 learners made decisions on the center predication of the RVC sentences based on the internal structure of the RVC. More test items should be included to find out why the learners treated the Action-Result RVCs in this way.
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Appendix 1: Questionnaire