English CFL Learners' Acquisition of le in Chinese Pivotal and Serial-events Sentences: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

Chinese and English have typological differences in marking the temporal categories of verbs in sentences with multiple verbs. The perfective morpheme "le"is conventionally used after V2 to mark the completion of the event-continuum represented by both V1 and V2 in Chinese pivotal or serial-events sentences. In reminiscent English sentences, V1 inflects with tense and takes the suffix "-ed". The current study aims to investigate if the contrast between English and Chinese influences Chinese English as foreign language (CFL) learners’ acquisition of “le” in pivotal and serial-events sentences. Via an analysis in HSK dynamic written composition corpus, we found misuses about mis-positioned "le" and lexical collocations in pivotal and serial-events sentences. The results showed that English CFL learners were influenced by English past tense marker "-ed" in the production of "le" in pivotal and serial-events sentences. L2 proficiency was not an influential factor in misusages but played a role in the total usage of these structures, i.e., high-proficiency learners produced these sentences more frequently than low-proficiency learners. It suggests that English CFL learners may have used the tense cue in their L1 to compose Chinese sentences with multiple verbs, and with the development of L2 proficiency, they tended to use pivotal or serial-events sentences more frequently. This finding reveals the morpho-syntactic transfer from English L1 to Chinese L2, contributes to the theories in second language acquisition in general, and gives pedagogical implications on Chinese L2 teaching.