2.3 Empirical L1 Studies of Chinese Passives
2.3.2 Tseng (1997)
Semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic aspects are all considered in Tseng (1997) on the acquisition of the bei-construction in Chinese. Children were claimed to be equipped with knowledge of all these aspects to fully acquire the construction. In the analysis, three main properties related to the passives were concerned: object animacy, transitivity, and sentence reversibility. The results indicated that transitivity and sentence reversibility were influential in children’s comprehension as well as production of the bei-construction, while patient animacy was less significant. In addition, Tseng accounted for the syntactic nature of the bei-construction and suggested that the bei-construction should be bi-clausal, where the surface subject should be base-generated.
Three experiments were applied: the act-out/imitation task, the elicited production task, and the grammatical judgment task; the first and third looked into the children’s understanding of the bei-construction while the second one examined their speech. Thirty subjects aged from 4;9 to 6;1 participated in her study and were divided into two groups, 14 in Group I (mean age: 5;0) and 16 in Group II (mean age: 6;1).
In the first experiment, the subjects were asked to repeat what the experimenter said and then acted out what they interpreted for the sentence with puppets and toys. Verb of transitivity, patient animacy, and sentence reversibility were properties included as tested materials in 21 sentences. According to the hierarchy of verbal transitivity, sentences included verbs of four types: (1) resultative, e.g., da po ‘to hit to break,’ chi wan ‘to eat up’; (2) actional, e.g., yao ‘to bite,’ xi ‘to wash’; (3) experiential, e.g., xi huan ‘to like,’
xiang nian ‘to miss’; and (4) intransitive, e.g., ku ‘to cry,’ san bu ‘to take a walk.’ Only
the former two could children imitate and act out; the rest of two types required their imitation.
The results of the imitation task showed that both groups of subjects were near to adult-like level. The results of the act-out task further suggested that the children at the age of 4;8 had already possessed certain knowledge of the bei-construction, but those at 6;0 still had not reached to adult-like performance. With respect to the tested properties, the younger children were under great influence, especially of the factors of verbal transitivity and reversibility. Younger subjects’ performance on resultative verbs was better than that on actional verbs, and their performance on nonreversible sentences was better than on the reversible ones. On the other hand, the older group showed no significant difference on the degree of verbal transitivity and sentence reversibility. In addition, Tseng’s study failed to argue for object animacy for the two groups in the
bei-construction.
The production task was then conducted with the aim of eliciting the
bei-constructions under a proper and felicitous context. Different from the former task,
the control group comprised of sixteen junior high school students (mean age: 13; 4) was asked to participate in the experiment. Variables of transitivity, object animacy and reversibility were all taken into consideration in designing the twenty-two test sentences.The outcome showed that for actional and resultative verbs there existed significant difference between the control group and the two experimental groups but there was no difference between Group I and Group II. This indicates that young children fewer than 6 have not yet acquire adult-like syntactic and pragmatic ability. Within the group, on the other hand, the performance of Group II and the control group both demonstrated a significant difference to different verbs of transitivity. However, Group I showed no difference to this property. In general, the overall tendency for the bei-construction was action verbs= resultative verbs> experiential verbs. Furthermore, reversible sentences
were found more difficult for the children than irreversible ones. Concerning the factor of object animacy, there was still no sufficient support from the data. In short, only two factors were found influential in children’s acquisition of Chinese passives: verb transitivity and sentence reversibility, which accords with the findings of the first experiment.
To account for the syntactic nature of the bei-construction in children language acquisition, a grammatical judgment task was employed. This task aimed to verify whether the bei-construction is a mono-clausal or bi-clausal structure and if any movement is involved in the formation of the construction (Tseng 1997:110). The same subjects, including the experimental and control groups, were asked to judge the acceptance of the real bei-construction together with three additional “pseudo
bei-constructions,” as in B, C, D below (adopted form Tseng 1997: 112):
A. NP2 bei NP1 V B. bei NP1 V NP2 C. NP2 bei NP1 V NP2 D. NP2 bei NP1 V pronoun
Three targeted properties related to the bei-construction, namely, verb transitivity, sentence reversibility and object animacy, were all examined in the test sentences (n=74).
After the task, children were asked to describe scenarios presented.
The hierarchy of acceptance for each type of the bei-construction is A> D> B> C. It was found that Structure A, due to its genuine status in the bei-construction, was most acceptable. On the other hand, Structure C, NP2 bei NP1 V NP2, was the least acceptable since it violated Principle C, in which the referential expression, NP2, must be free everywhere. In particular, acceptance of Structures D and B suggest that there should be an empty pronoun following the verb in the bei-construction. This is regarded as the counterevidence against the claim of A-movement, in which a trace should be left behind
instead of an empty pronoun. Accordingly, the result lends support to Chiu’s (1993) and Li’s (1994) proposal that the bei-construction is bi-clausal and there is no movement involved.
Finally, the children tended to use active forms with actional and experiential verbs in their free descriptions of presented events. When resultative verbs were involved, the percentage of the bei-construction was higher though it was not predominantly high. In fact, the use of the bei-construction is functionally loaded, which heavily relies on an emphasis of state-changing of the patient role and the conveyance of disposal as well as adverse meaning. In other words, children must be equipped with semantic and pragmatic knowledge of the bei-construction together with syntactic competence.
In Tseng’s (1997) study, three experiments designed to account for children’s use of the Chinese bei-construction from different aspects, i.e., syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic ones. However, there remain some problems in her experiments. The first problem is with her unbalanced numbers of experimental sentences under each subtype in her tasks. For instance, in the act-out/imitation task, there were seven test sentences under Action verbs, four under Experiential verbs, six under Resultative verbs, and four under Intransitive verbs. The unequal numbers may lead to task effects and statistics errors.
Besides, the control elements in her study were not property under control, e.g., in the act-out/imitation task, the subjects were required to act out on only partial structures. The incompatible elements may weaken the validity and authority of the overall outcome.