The First Language Influence on the Second Language Acquisition of Mandarin Resultative Verb Compounds

[[abstract]]The resultative verb compounds (hereafter RVC) in Chinese consist of two verbal elements, with the second element signifying the result of the action/state denoted by the first (Li and Thompson 1981). Smith (1997) hence suggests that RVCs are like English Accomplishments. However, there are some cross-linguistic variations between RVCs and Accomplishments, though the two verbs have the action-result semantic relation between their semantic components. Tai (1984), for example, indicates that the Mandarin RVC encodes only the aspectual meaning of the result; thus, RVCs are instantaneous verbs, whereas English Accomplishments with the aspectual meaning of both the action and result are durative verbs. Tai (2003) also points out that in Mandarin RVCs, the result of an event is ‘overtly’ expressed with the resultative morpheme, while in English Accomplishments, it is ‘covertly’ expressed, or ‘implied’ in the meaning of the verb (Tai 2003). Based on the difference between Mandarin and English in the specification of ‘result’, Tai claims that English speakers would attend less to the result part of the event than Chinese speakers. Motivated by the cross-linguistic variations between Mandarin RVCs and English Accomplishments, this study explores 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—divided based on the semantic property of the two constituents-- Activity-Result, Semelfactive-Result and State-Result RVCs. Forty native English speakers learning Chinese at the MTC participated in this study, and they were further divided into two groups according to their Chinese proficiency levels, i.e., the intermediate and high groups. The instrument was a survey composed of two tasks--grammaticality judgment (GJ) and sentence interpretation (SI). The overall results showed that the learners’ performance differed according to the three RVC types. They did best on the Sta-R RVCs, with the notable exception of test questions containing both a Sta-R RVC and the adverb chayidianr ‘almost’ in the SI task. Among the three RVC types, the Sem-R RVC had the lowest accuracy rate. Though the learners performed better on the Act-R RVC than on the Sem-R RVC, there was no significant difference between the performances. A further examination revealed that the English learners had the knowledge that the result part constitutes the semantic focus of RVCs and treated Act-R and Sem-R RVCs as English typical Achievements and derived Achievements, respectively. Moreover, the results showed that the learners’ L1 played a crucial role in the L2 acquisition of Mandarin RVCs. In the GJ task, it has been observed the compatibility between the meaning of the derived Achievement and the English progressive misled the learners into considering that Sem-R RVCs could appear with the Mandarin imperfective aspect marker zhengzai, which implies that the L1-L2 difference in structure brings about negative transfer. With respect to positive transfer, it was found that the accuracy of judgment for the Act-R RVC was higher than that for the Sem-R RVC, suggesting that the L1 knowledge of (typical) Achievements had great help in acquiring the Act-R RVC. In the SI task, the results showed that as far as the Action-Result RVCs are concerned, the frequency of the result interpretation for questions with the adverb ‘almost’ is higher than that for questions without the adverb, suggesting that the learners relied heavily on English Achievements when making decision on the center predication of sentences with such RVCs. Last but not least, our results showed that English-speaking people attended more to the action part of the event than to the action part.