The Functions of the Nontarget Be in the Written Interlanguage of Chinese Learners of English

Abstract

Through examining all instances of the nontarget be before verbs in the written interlanguage of Chinese learners at different proficiency levels, the present study reveals that nontarget be performs different functions, and there is a function shift from low to high proficiency levels. At the lowest levels, be is used more as a general filler for different functional categories in INFL (inflection). As the proficiency level increases, be becomes more specialized in marking tense/voice. Finally at the highest level, be only performs the function of marking passive voice of unaccusative verbs. It is argued that the different functions of nontarget be derive from different sources: deficient knowledge of surface verbal morphology and learnability problems posed by the marked argument alignment of unaccusative verbs. It is further argued that the function shift is strong proof that wrong instantiation of functional categories will disappear when knowledge of verbal morphology increases, but the learnability problem posed by the unusual semantics-syntax mapping of unaccusative verbs will persist into advanced developmental stages.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research reported here is part of a larger project on the L2 acquisition of the English tense/aspect system by Chinese speakers and the L2 acquisition of the Chinese aspectual system by non-Chinese speakers. Thanks also go to Dr. Huang Yue Yuan, Miss Wong Kali, Dr. Cai Jinting, and Dr. Zhang Jun, who helped with data collection, data entry, or with data coding and the statistics for the paper. I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose detailed comments and suggestions were extremely helpful.

FUNDING

The project is funded by the University Grant Committee of Hong Kong with the project code RGC/97-98/68. The author wishes to thank the University Grant Committee for their generous support.

Notes

1. ¹Five groups of students contributed to the interlanguage corpus: Primary 5 = primary grade 5 (10-year-olds), Secondary 1 = secondary year 1 (12-year-olds), Secondary 3 = secondary year 3 (14-year-olds), Secondary 5 = secondary year 5 (16-year-olds), and University 1 = university year 1 (19-year-olds).

2. ²No special effort is made to distinguish Cantonese from modern Chinese in our discussion, because (i) our subjects speak Cantonese but write modern Chinese; and (ii) spoken Cantonese and written Chinese share the same INFL structure.

3. ³In our corpus, a coded sentence is basically an equivalent of a T-unit as defined by Hunt: “one main clause plus the subordinate clauses attached to or embedded within it” (Hunt 1965:49). Coordinated clauses were coded as separate sentences. Discourse markers such as “good” and “thanks” were not coded for examination.

4. ⁴Secondary 6 and 7 in Hong Kong are only for students who intend to pursue a university degree. Secondary 7 students mainly train for A-level examinations.

5. ⁵Yau (1991) had only 20 students for each of her two groups, and all her subjects were from the same school, the band of which was not mentioned in her paper.

6. ⁶The given introductory sentences were not coded for examination.

7. ⁷The distinction between unaccusatives and unergatives was made on the basis of the criteria discussed in Rosen (1984), Zaenen (1988), Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995), and Yang (1999).

8. ⁸The identification of event types was done by using the “in/for an hour” test, the entailment test, and some other tests developed by Vendler (1967), Dowty (1979), and Smith (1997).

9. ⁹The information structure was examined against the criteria discussed in Hopper (1979) and Labov & Waleztky (1997).

10. ¹⁰Both of them had finished a master’s degree in the Applied Linguistics program and were studying for a doctoral degree in linguistics at the time of data processing.

11. ¹¹Bare infinitives are also included in this subcategory.