Abstract

In this seminar, I will present the experiment design, preliminary results and insights/restrictions of the pilot study for my ongoing PhD project, which aims to look into how English-, Spanish-, and Koreans-speaking learners acquire applicative constructions in Mandarin Chinese. It is reported that all four languages choose different types of applicative heads when introducing non-core arguments, while Spanish shares more similarities in the choice with Chinese than the other two languages do. On this basis, I’d like to examine the effect of L1 transfer including the role of inflectional morphology and lexical scope of syntactic generalizations. Comprehension test and production test are employed in the current study in the hope of tapping both explicit and implicit knowledge of L2ers. The pilot study was conducted among 10 native speakers of Taiwanese Mandarin and the results correspond to the analysis of Chinese applicative construction, thus validating the design of test sentences in the experiment.