The Instruction and Acquisition of the BA Construction by Students of Chinese as a Foreign Language 1793641412, 9781793641410

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The Instruction and Acquisition of the BA Construction by Students of Chinese as a Foreign Language

The Instruction and Acquisition of the BA Construction by Students of Chinese as a Foreign Language Hongying Xu

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-7936-4141-0 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-4142-7 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To my parents, Yousheng Xu and Yinbao Li, and to my husband, Hong Zhou, and my daughter, Yining (Tracy) Zhou, for their unconditional love and support.

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

ix

Acknowledgmentsxiii Introduction 1 1 The BA Construction

19

2 Acquisition of the BA Construction Among L2 Learners of Chinese

45

3 Teaching the BA Construction in Chinese as a Foreign Language

63

4 Acquisition of the BA Construction: An Interface Perspective

77

5 Awareness Among L2 Chinese Learners on the Usage of the BA Construction109 6 Using the Processing Instruction Approach to Teach the BA Construction131 7 Implications from the Acquisition Studies and Guidelines for Instruction163 Appendix 1

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Appendix 2

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Appendix 3

181

Appendix 4

185

vii

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Appendix 5

Contents

187

References189 Index 205 About the Author

213

List of Tables and Figures

TABLES Table 4.1 Demographic Features of the L2 Chinese Participants 85 Table 4.2 Distribution of Sentences in the Grammaticality Judgment Task 86 Table 4.3 Distribution of Sentences in the Contextual Preference Task 86 Table 4.4 Internal Consistency Reliability for Properties from Different Domains 88 Table 4.5 Pairwise Comparisons of L2 High Group: Syntax and Syntax-Semantics Properties 89 Table 4.6 Pairwise Comparisons of L2 Low Group: Syntax and Syntax-Semantics Properties 90 Table 4.7 Group Acceptance Rates across the Syntax and SyntaxSemantics Interface Properties 90 Table 4.8 L2 High Group’s Acceptance of Ungrammatical Sentences: Syntax vs. Syntax-Semantics Properties 91 Table 4.9 L2 Low Group’s Acceptance of Grammatical vs. Ungrammatical Sentences: Syntax vs. SyntaxSemantics Properties 92 Table 4.10 Acceptance of Different Sentence Types in Different Contexts across Groups 98 Table 4.11 One-Way ANOVA Results of Acceptance Rates across Groups 98 Table 4.12 Post Hoc Pairwise Comparisons of Acceptance Rates among the Groups 99 Table 5.1 Distribution of Sentences in the Paired Grammaticality Judgment Task 115 ix

x

List of Tables and Figures

Table 5.2 Paired-Samples T-tests of the NS Group’s Acceptance Rates across the Subsets of BA Sentences Table 5.3 Paired-Samples T-tests of the L2 High Group’s Acceptance Rates across the Subsets of BA Sentences Table 5.4 Paired-Samples T-tests of the L2 Low Group’s Acceptance Rates across the Subsets of BA Sentences Table 5.5 Comparisons of Acceptance Rates across the Groups: NS, L2 High, and L2 Low Table 5.6 Games-Howell Tests: Pairwise Post Hoc Comparisons of Acceptance Rates Table 6.1 Participants’ Demographic Information Table 6.2 Accuracy of Comprehension Tasks: PI Group vs. Control Group Table 6.3 Accuracy of Production Tasks: PI Group vs. Control Group Table 6.4 Accuracy of Comprehension Tests: EI Group vs. CF Group vs. Control Group Table 6.5 Accuracy of Production Tests: EI Group vs. CF Group vs. Control Group

119 121 122 123 124 145 153 153 154 155

FIGURES Figure 4.1 Accuracy Rates (%) on Core Syntax and SyntaxSemantics Properties across Groups 89 Figure 4.2 Item Accuracy Rates of Grammatical BA Sentences Under the Word Order Constraint across Groups 94 Figure 4.3 Item Accuracy Rates of Grammatical BA Sentences Under the Complex Verb Constraint across Groups 95 Figure 4.4 Item Accuracy Rates of Ungrammatical BA Sentences Under the Complex Verb Constraint across Groups 95 Figure 4.5 Item Accuracy Rates of Ungrammatical BA Sentences under the Affectedness on BA NP Constraint across Groups 96 Figure 4.6 Accuracy of Syntax vs. Syntax-Discourse Properties across Groups 97 Figure 4.7 Item Accuracy Rates of BA-Preferred Contexts across Groups 100 Figure 4.8 Mean Accuracy Rates of Interface Properties across Groups 101 Figure 4.9 Mean Accuracy Rates of Syntax-Semantics Interface Properties across Groups 102 Figure 5.1 Accuracy Rates (%) on Obligatory BA vs. Optional BA Sentences across Groups 117

List of Tables and Figures

Figure 5.2 The NS Group’s Acceptance Rates of Each Option across the Subsets of BA Sentences Figure 5.3 The L2 High Group’s Acceptance Rates of Each Option across the Subsets of BA Sentences Figure 5.4 The L2 Low Group’s Acceptance Rates of Each Option across the Subsets of BA Sentences Figure 5.5 Item Accuracy Rates on the Obligatory BA Subset across Groups Figure 5.6 Item Accuracy Rates on the Optional BA Subset across Groups Figure 6.1 Pictures Used in Referential Structured Input Activity (1) Figure 6.2 Pictures Used in Referential Structured Input Activity (2) Figure 6.3 Pictures Used in the Production Task Figure 6.4 Procedure Flowchart

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119 120 121 125 126 146 147 149 151

Acknowledgments

Finally, I have reached the point of writing my acknowledgement, and I have been looking forward to this moment for a while. I would like to take this opportunity to thank those people who have helped get me here. First and foremost, I thank my advisors, Dr. Alison Gabriel, Dr. Yan Li, and Dr. Manuela Gonzalez-Bueno. It was Dr. Li who first kindled my interest in the acquisition of the BA construction. Dr. Gabriel first made me aware of the Interface Hypothesis and started me on the path of exploring the acquisition of the BA construction. Her tremendous support and advice during the whole process was invaluable. I am grateful to Dr. Gonzalez-Bueno for bringing the Processing Approach to my attention after going over the finding from my acquisition study. Their help and encouragement provided me with the very solid foundation that allowed me to proceed along this line. I am also very grateful for the support I received from the administration in my department and my college here at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Running a sole-member language program is not an easy job and I would not have been able to continue my research if not for the encouragement and support of Dr. Marie Moeller, who was then the department chair. A grant from the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities made it possible for me to hire a student research assistant whose work enabled me to set up the study on using the Processing Instruction approach to teach the BA construction. I am also grateful to all the participants in my studies: the native speakers in China; my friends and former colleagues who endured my constant barrage of all kinds of BA sentences (including very awkward ones); and, of course, those learners of Chinese in the United States, some of whom were my students. Thank you for your passion for learning Chinese and for your trust in me. xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my editors at Lexington Books, Jana Hodges-Kluck and Alex Rallo. If Jana had not reached out to me in the spring of 2019, I would not have started this book in the first place. Alex’s help and support on this, my first book project, is deeply appreciated. She was always there to answer my innumerable questions and to give me helpful suggestions. In addition, I would extend special thanks to my friend, Randi Hacker, for copy editing my manuscript multiple times. As a non-native writer of English, I would not have made it without her help. Last but not least, my gratitude must go to my family, especially my husband, Hong Zhou, for keeping our house clean, making sure we were well-fed and healthy, and most importantly, for making me feel supported and loved. I would also like to thank my daughter, Tracy, for her unconditional trust in me. This book is for all of you.

Introduction

TEACHING AND LEARNING CHINESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES Increased Student Population in the Past Decades The past two decades have seen the biggest increase in the number of learners of Chinese as a foreign language in the United States, both in K-12 education and in higher education. In 2017, the American Councils for International Education (AC) published The National K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey Report, in collaboration with other organizations, including the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), the Modern Language Association (MLA), and the National Councils for State Supervisors for Foreign Languages (NCSSFL). The report shows that during the school year of 2014–2015, 227,086 K-12 students were enrolled in a type of Chinese class, ranking Chinese as the language with the fourth largest enrollment after Spanish, French, and German. There were 1,144 Chinese programs at the high school level, mostly academic year courses, including traditional classroom courses, dual-language immersion programs, immersion programs and online and hybrid programs. The Chinese programs accounted for 6.43% of all the foreign language programs at high schools in the United States. In U.S. secondary schools, AP (Advanced Placement) Chinese Language and Culture courses were first designed and implemented in 2007. Among the 1,144 high school Chinese programs, 260 (22.72%) of them offer AP Chinese, and 59 (5.16%) of them offer International Baccalaureate (IB) Chinese courses. According to the score distribution report released by the College Board, 13,853 students took 1

2

Introduction

the AP Chinese exam in 2019, part of a continuous increase from the 6,388 students who took it in 2010. Among all the less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) offered at high schools, Chinese has the largest number of programs and largest student population: 72% of the LCTLs programs offer Chinese, and 80% of the students enrolled in LCTLs programs learn Chinese. There are 1,144 high schools and school districts offering Chinese classes, with an enrollment of 46,727 students. As summarized in the report, “the explosion of Chinese enrollment and in the number of high school LCTL programs offering Chinese is a dominant feature in the landscape of LCTL education in the U.S.” (AC 2017, 18). The increase over the last two decades in both learners of Chinese and different types of Chinese programs reflects the changes in policies and curriculum at the national level, including SAT II subject tests and the Advanced Placement (AP) program. In 1994, Chinese was first included as one of the SAT II subject tests (Wen 2011a). Before the AP Chinese Language and Culture test was first offered in 2007, AP Chinese courses were designed and begun at many high schools. Since then, there has been a consistent increase in the number of students taking the AP Chinese exam. Based on the annual reports of student grade distribution released by College Board, in 2007, 3,261 students took the exam, whereas in 2017, a decade later, 13,091 students took it. The number remained robust even during the pandemic period (2019–2022). In 2022, the number reached 5,277. Another factor that contributed to the development of education of Chinese as a foreign language is the funding and support from various institutes at different levels. The National Security Language Initiative (NSLI) is a program launched by the U.S. government in 2006 to promote foreign language education, especially critical languages, including Chinese. It is an initiative that involves multiple agencies, including the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Program. Programs hosted under these agencies focus on K-16 students, instructors, professional training, and program and curriculum development. For example, the Language Flagship Undergraduate Programs fund intensive college-level language programs to bring learners to a superior language proficiency level so that they can function well in that language as professionals. STARTALK, a program sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provides short-term or year-long language education and summer language educator training programs. These programs have profoundly impacted the landscape of foreign language education in the United States. According to a report released by the U.S. Department of Education and Office of Postsecondary Education in 2008, Chinese programs at the K-12 level funded by the Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) grants increased from nine in 2003 to

Introduction

3

80 in 2007, the largest increase among other critical languages in the same period. The number of undergraduate Language Flagship centers increased to 13 in 2007 from three in 2002 (USDE and OPE 2008, 2) The STARTALK summer language program, launched in 2007, reached 1,322 students and teachers in 21 states and Washington, D.C. (USDE and OPE 2008, 3). At the college level, more students than ever are either declaring Chinese as their major or electing it to fulfill their language requirement. According to an MLA survey conducted in 2006 by Furman, Goldberg, and Lusin, 51,582 students were enrolled in Chinese across 2,795 higher education institutions (USDE and OPE 2008, 10). Between the years 2002 and 2006, there was a 51% increase in enrollment, which represents the second greatest increase in foreign language enrollment among the foreign languages offered at higher education institutes (USDE and OPE 2008, 13). According to MLA sources, enrollment increased to 60,976 in 2009. Although the MLA reported a dip in enrollment in some schools in 2016, enrollment in Chinese nevertheless either remained stable or increased among almost half of the programs (47.5%) at the college level (Looney and Lusin 2019, 86). The demographic features of the student population who enroll in Chinese classes have also changed over these years. Li, Wen, and Xie (2014) published a report on their large scale-survey on college-level Chinese language programs in North America. They found that the ethnic background of learners of Chinese was more diversified than it used to be. Decades ago, Chinese learners were mostly Caucasians (Linnell 2001, cited in Li, Wen, and Xie 2014, 24), but the survey done by Li, Wen, and Xie (2014) showed that, during the 2011–2012 academic year, only 50.68% of the student population were Caucasian, 20.97% of students were heritage speakers of Mandarin or Cantonese, 11.47% were speakers of other Asian languages, and 15.66% students were Latin American or African American (Li, Wen, and Xie 2014, 23–24). The learning goals among students have also changed, from attending graduate programs to becoming a sinologist to more practical usage of the language, to the development of language and culture competence (Xie 2014, cited in Wen 2020, 1). These changes impose new challenges on educators in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. It is important that they keep themselves informed of these changes and make adjustments and revisions in their curricula, assessment, and instructional strategies accordingly (Li, Wen, and Xie 2014, 45). Challenges in Learning Chinese as a Foreign Language The significant development in the educational presentation of Chinese as a foreign language in the United States has also imposed various challenges, which mainly come from all the factors involved in the learning process:

4

Introduction

the target language, learners, instructors, and curriculum and instructional activities. Chinese is considered one of the foreign languages that English-speaking learners find difficult to acquire. The U.S. Foreign Service Institute, based on their experience in teaching languages to U.S. diplomats, provides an average time for a student to reach “Professional Working Proficiency” in a target language. Foreign languages are grouped into four categories that range from those needing the least time to achieve proficiency (Category I) to those needing the most time (Category IV). Mandarin is listed in Category IV along with Arabic, Japanese, and Korean, all of which are referred to as “Super hard languages: languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.” The increasingly diverse student population brings in many differences, including family background, previous exposure to Chinese language and culture, learning goals, motivation levels and attitudes, and so on. How to address their differences and retain the students in the Chinese program has become a big challenge. Wen (2011a) conducted a survey among more than 300 college students in the Chinese programs at some state universities. She found that positive attitudes toward and good experience in learning Chinese, along with instrumental motivation, were the strongest predictors of learners’ continuation of Chinese studies. As practitioners of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, instructors are thus facing challenges from both the language they are teaching and the diverse student population they are working with. How can they give students a positive experience in their learning process and help them see the progress they are making towards their learning goals? Scholars in this field proposed that instructors learn about their students, including their attitudes, motivation, anxiety, and learning styles, while, at the same time, keeping themselves informed of recent research findings on the process of language learning so that they can employ research-based instruction (Wen 2011b; Ke and Li 2011). This book attempts to make some contributions in this regard and share findings on how learners of Chinese acquire the BA construction so that Chinese instructors can use instructional strategies in their classes to target the aspects that give students the most difficulty. What, precisely, has made Chinese such a hard language for Englishspeaking learners to acquire? It is important to pinpoint the particular difficulties before more effective teaching and learning strategies can be used to facilitate the learning process. Instructors may have anecdotal observations and evidence; however, sometimes what is observed does not accurately reflect what is actually the case because various factors can contribute to what is seen. We had better learn about this fundamental issue from both parties involved: instructors/researchers and learners.

Introduction

5

Bo Hu conducted a comprehensive survey among college-level learners of L2 Chinese in the UK. The questions in the Chinese Language Learning Difficulty Survey were designed based on input and comments from both experienced Chinese instructors and learners of Chinese at different proficiency levels. This survey includes 36 aspects of Chinese learning and covers reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills. One hundred and seventy-six learners participated in the survey. They indicated their perceived difficulty of these learning aspects on a five-point Likert scale: 1 being the easiest and 5 being the most difficult. Hu regrouped the learning aspects based on the perceived difficulty and identified six categories, ranging from grammar to aural perception to words to oral production to pronunciation to recall (Hu 2010, 102). It may seem surprising that L2 Chinese learners perceived Chinese grammar as the most challenging aspect among all aspects, since Chinese grammar, compared with the grammar of other languages, is easy in that it does not require inflections to realize tense, aspect, case, gender, and so on. It was also found that the perceived difficulty of Chinese grammar persists across proficiency levels and among students of different learning styles (e.g., visual vs. auditory) (Hu 2010, 109). Within Chinese grammar, participants indicated difficulty in using functional words such as 就jiu, 还hai, 在zai, 对dui, 跟gen, 给gei, understanding and using special structures involving 把ba or 被bei, using particles such as 了le,着 zhe, 过guo, forming sentences in the right word order, and so on. Hu’s study went one step further than previous studies in this regard and provided a more comprehensive picture of the difficulties perceived by English-speaking learners of Chinese, including different linguistic aspects and skills. The participants in his study also provided a self-assessment of their Chinese proficiency in different skills and reported their preferred learning styles, both of which enriched the picture of perceived difficulties among a more heterogeneous student population. The study therefore provides an excellent starting point for both research in and instruction of Chinese as a foreign language. Although the writer has not found a similar survey conducted in the United States, it can be assumed that similar results may be obtained since the students in the United States are also native speakers of English and are learning Chinese as a foreign language, most of them in a classroom setting. Research in Acquisition of L2 Chinese To capitalize on this trend of an increase in the population of those learning Chinese as a foreign language, instructors of Chinese, as well as researchers in Chinese applied linguistics, have begun to examine the acquisition of Chinese as a foreign language or a heritage language in the past few decades.

6

Introduction

Conferences at regional, national, and international levels have been held so that researchers and educators can share their research findings. Books and journal articles have been published that report findings on the learning processes and language development among L2 Chinese learners (Ke and Li 2011; Ke 2012). The Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA), first founded in 1962, has seen the establishment of many regional CLTA associations. It has published five monographs, the most recent one, Studies on Learning and Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, co-edited by Xiaohong Wen and Xin Jiang, published in 2019. Between 1966 and 2013, 745 articles were published in the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, covering topics such as the linguistic properties of the Chinese language, language skills, pedagogy, literature, and culture (Casas-Tost and Rovira-Esteva 2015, 31). As Nan Jiang points out, “there has been a considerable increase in theorymotived empirical studies that have appeared in top-tier second language acquisition (SLA) journals since 2000.” (Jiang 2014, 1). These studies cover a wide range of topics, including the acquisition of Chinese characters, pronunciation, vocabulary, and morphosyntactic structures. For example, in 2014, as an outcome of a 2012 international conference on Chinese as a second language, a book titled Advances in Chinese as a Second Language: Acquisition and Processing was published which shared some of the studies presented at that conference. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Second Language Acquisition, published in 2018, highlights the perspectives that have been employed in investigating the acquisition of Chinese. It also summarizes findings from studies that examined different aspects of the acquisition of Chinese, including Chinese pronunciation, Chinese characters, grammar, pragmatics, and so on. This book, to the knowledge of its author, is the first comprehensive collection of reviews on the acquisition of Chinese as a target language. Studies that explored the acquisition of morphosyntactic structures identified some error patterns among L2 Chinese learners, including overuse or underuse of certain structures. These researchers also proposed some factors that may have contributed to the observed error patterns. Since the present book explores the acquisition of the BA construction, it will give a brief summary on the findings on the elements that most frequently collocate with the BA construction, namely, the aspect marker 了le, 着zhe, 过guo, directional complements, resultative complements, and locatives. In Chinese, the particle 了le can fulfill two functions: it can be used as a post-verb aspect marker to indicate the completion of action from the speaker’s viewpoint, and it can be used as a sentence-final le that “indicates a currently relevant state; that is, a state of affairs that has special current relevance with respect to some particular situation” (Ke 2012, 63). Sometimes,

Introduction

7

in what is referred to as double le, le is used both after a verb and at the end of a sentence, which makes it harder for learners to map the form and its meanings. The particle 着zhe is used as an imperfective and durative marker that “only occurs with atelic eventualities” (Lin 2006, 14) and that “tends to be interpreted as present” (Slabakova 2015, 288). The particle 过guo is an aspect marker that indicates a “bounded prior situation, [that] tends to be interpreted as a past, or resultant state” (Slabakova 2015, 288). Research has found that learners of Chinese can interpret temporal meanings in Chinese sentences by following the lexical aspect of verbs and aspect markers (Slabakova 2015, 286). However, L2 Chinese learners encounter more challenges in using aspect markers to indicate temporal meanings. Studies from either corpus-based error analysis or from data elicited from surveys found that students across proficiency levels made frequent and persistent errors with 了le (Duff and Li 2002; Li and Yan 2017; Teng 1999; Wen 1995 and 1997; Xu 2020; Yang 2016; Yang, Huang, and Cao 2000; Yang, Huang, and Sun 1999; Yang and Wu 2014; Yao 2014; Zhao 1997.) Learners showed overuse of the perfective aspect marker 了le and underuse of the sentencefinal 了le (Duff and Li 2002; Teng 1999; Wen 1995; Zhao 1997. See a more detailed summary and analysis in Lu and Ke 2018, 169). However, some survey-elicited data indicate that learners, especially at lower proficiency levels, show underuse of 了le (Duff and Li 2002; Yang, Huang, and Cao 2000; Yang and Wu 2014) regardless of the context in which learners were exposed to the Chinese language, be it a study abroad program, an immersion program, or a regular classroom situation (Yang and Wu 2014). An interaction between the use of 了le and the lexical aspects of verbs has also been observed. Learners overused 了le with stative verbs or activity verbs and underused it with accomplishment and achievement verbs (Duff and Li 2002; Yang 2016; Yao 2014). There is no consensus on the acquisition order or the development process of the aspect markers in Chinese, including 了le, 着zhe, and 过guo, among L2 Chinese learners. Some studies found that learners acquired 了le and 过guo earlier than 着zhe (Wen 1997). However, others found that, although learners made more errors with 着zhe and 过guo at a lower proficiency level than the errors they made with 了le, their errors with 着zhe and 过guo decreased dramatically as their proficiency improved, which was not the case with 了le (Yang, Huang, and Sun 1999). Verbal complements also impose great difficulties upon learners of L2 Chinese, including directional complements to indicate motion events and resultative complements to denote a bounded complete event. Compared with resultative complements, the directional complements involve more elements and the placement of the object, which makes them even more challenging. Studies show that L2 learners, regardless of their native languages, seem to

8

Introduction

acquire directional complements in a certain sequence. The simple ­directional complements (e.g. 跑来paolai, 回来huilai, 走开zoukai) seem to be acquired at the beginning level, the complex directional complements seem to be acquired later, and the complex directional complements with an object seem to be acquired last (Qian 1997; Yang 2003). Learners also fail to specify different types of nouns and therefore overgeneralize the placement of the object in the directional complements by leaving them after the complements (Yang 2004). Resultative verb compounds (RVCs) are another important type of compound, and they either denote the completion of an action or the state as the result of an action. Corpus-based error analysis studies have found that L2 Chinese learners develop their use and awareness of the RVCs in several stages: the formulaic stage, the emergence-of-compound-awareness stage, and the lexical-development stage (Zhang 2014, 2). At the formulaic stage, learners produce RVCs with higher accuracy, but lower variety, that are limited to the RVCs from their input. At the emergence-of-compound-awareness stage, learners started to coin compounds in their communication, but mostly focus on the “semantically salient component,” and they show an underuse of RVCs. At the lexical-development stage, learners show higher frequency of usage, with higher accuracy and with a greater variety of verbs and complements (Zhang 2014, 19). The RVCs in Chinese are different than those in English both in syntax and semantics. English-speaking learners of Chinese show more difficulty in reconstructing the semantic component in RVCs than the syntactic structure. When the thematic structure of Chinese RVCs is similar to their L1, English, that is, when the post-verb and complement noun are the patient and theme of the verb as well as the result, learners show better performance in accepting these structures. However, they show difficulty in accepting RVCs that indicate a different thematic structure from their L1, English (Yuan and Zhao 2010). Unlike in English, time and locative phrases in Chinese are both placed pre-verbally, which structures pose challenges to English-speaking Chinese language learners who must adhere to the restriction while producing time and locative phrases in Chinese. Research has shown that learners have more difficulty with locative phrases than they do with time phrases, especially when the locative phrase is in a complex structure (Jia and Liu 2016). Some studies explored the acquisition of Chinese morphosyntax within a theoretical framework in the second language acquisition field. However, as Yang Zhao points out in his review of articles on L2 Chinese acquisition, some studies were descriptive in nature and failed to fit themselves into the SLA literature. He also suggests that there could be some sense in placing L2 Chinese studies within the framework of SLA theories (Zhao 2011, 568).

Introduction

9

Narrowing his examination down to focus solely on studies on the acquisition of morphosyntax, Chuanren Ke found that most of the scholars employed one of the following approaches: the generative linguistic approach, the skill acquisition approach, the processability approach, the cognitive grammar approach, the usage-based constructionist approach, or the social-oriented approach (Lu and Ke 2018, 185–188). It is clear that more studies employing different approaches are needed before a better understanding of the acquisition of Chinese can truly be arrived at. A good understanding of the learning process will provide teachers with concrete information about what to teach and the implications of how to teach it. Teaching based on this information will certainly facilitate the learning process. Findings from studies on the acquisition of foreign languages are known to contribute to more effective teaching; this point of view has been expressed in many studies that explore the instruction of grammar in a foreign language classroom (Meng 2009; Sun 2010; Zeng 2014, among others). SCOPE OF THIS BOOK This book focuses on the acquisition and instruction of the BA construction in Chinese as a foreign language in the United States, with the hope that the findings will shed light on the use of instructional strategies to facilitate the acquisition of the BA construction, a grammatical construction that is unique in Chinese and is particularly difficult for L2 Chinese learners. It mainly reports and discusses two individual yet related studies in the setting of research along this line. The first one investigated L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of some properties of the BA construction with regard to the nature of the cognitive domains that each property involves. Inspired by the findings from the first study, the second study explored the effectiveness of a particular teaching method in helping students learn the properties that they have difficulty with. THE BA CONSTRUCTION The BA construction (把字句Baziju in Chinese) is a unique and very important linguistic construction in Chinese. It gets its name from the presence of the character 把ba. BA is considered a grammatical article and an object marker. The BA construction is referred to as the “disposal” form by the well-known Chinese linguist Li Wang: “[It] states how a person is handled, manipulated, or dealt with; how something is disposed of; or how an affair

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Introduction

is conducted” (translated by Li (1974), cited in Li & Thompson (1981). An example of the BA construction follows: 1) 他 把 书 放 Ta Ba shu fang He BA book put “He put the book on the desk.”

在 zai at

桌 zhuo desk

上 shang on top of

The BA construction developed from a serial verb construction and was first used around 1000 A.D. It was listed by Li Wang (1988) as one of the five major historical changes in Chinese grammar. The BA construction was chosen as the subject of this book due to the important role it plays in the Chinese language, its importance in acquiring true competency in Chinese, and the importance of the way it is taught in the Chinese language classroom in order to facilitate this true competency. Additionally, it was examined in order to better understand and deconstruct the notorious difficulties encountered by L2 Chinese students in learning this construction. The BA construction plays an important role in Chinese. As Audrey Li puts it: “[The BA construction] is an extremely prominent pattern in Chinese, very commonly used in daily speech.” (Li 2001, 1). Erbaugh (1982), as cited in Hang Du (2004), estimates that 8–24% of the sentences in adult native Chinese speakers’ speech use the BA construction (Du 2004, 73). Yuhua Ren collected over 4,000 sentences whose predicates include a verb and its complement, and she found that over 500 of these employed the BA construction (Ren 1998, 82). In order to be grammatical, the BA construction must abide by many constraints. Some constraints are purely syntactic. For example, the presence of BA in a sentence results in a subject + BA + noun phrase + verb + other elements word order, which differs from the subject + verb + object word order normally followed in Chinese. This word order is illustrated in Sentence 1) above. Other constraints occur at the interface between syntax and semantics or syntax and discourse. For example, the verb used in the BA construction must be complex, meaning that the verb must be followed by a complement or preceded by an adverb. Furthermore, the noun phrase that follows BA (the BA NP) must be affected in some way by the action indicated by the verb and its complement. Moreover, the use of the BA construction is preferred when the BA NP is the secondary topic, that is, information that is already known to both the speaker and the listener, and the speaker wants to highlight in what way it has been affected. The use of the BA construction depends on different factors. Under certain circumstances, it is syntax driven and thus obligatory. In Chinese, the number of arguments that can follow a verb is limited. When a verb is followed by a

Introduction

11

prepositional phrase that is closely related to the verb in semantic meaning, the argument position is occupied by the prepositional phrase. In this case, the real object is forced to move to a preverbal position, as illustrated in Sentence 1) above. In other cases, different patterns can be used to express a similar meaning. In those cases, the use of a BA sentence is driven by contexts and discourses: when the BA NP is known information and acts as the secondary topic, and the sentence is describing the effects on the BA NP, the BA construction is preferred. With so many constraints in form and usage, it is not surprising that the BA construction is difficult to acquire, even for native speakers. Studies on the acquisition of the BA construction among native Chinese children indicate that this construction is acquired at what might be considered a late age. Rueih-Lirng Sharon Fahn claimed that children acquiring Chinese as a native language started to produce and comprehend the BA construction at the age of three, and their mastery becomes adult-like around the age of five (Fahn 1993, 90), which, compared with the stages at which other grammar patterns are acquired, is rather late. This conclusion was echoed in Jespon (1989). It is not difficult to understand, then, that the BA construction is notoriously difficult for L2 learners of Chinese (Du 2004; Li 2001; Li 2004; Zhang 2002, among others). This researcher’s own teaching experience also indicates that learners of Chinese make plenty of errors using this construction or avoid using it altogether even when its usage is obligatory.

ACQUISITION OF THE BA CONSTRUCTION There are many linguistic studies on the BA construction itself, including those on its syntactic structure, its semantic meanings, the function of BA itself, and its discourse meaning, to name just a few. However, not as many studies have examined the acquisition of the BA construction, especially among L2 learners of Chinese. What makes the BA construction so difficult for L2 learners of Chinese to acquire? Is it due to the various constraints on this construction? And, if so, is each constraint of equal difficulty? Although it has been consistently observed that the BA construction is extremely difficult for L2 learners, there are, unfortunately, only a few studies that have systematically examined this issue by teasing apart the construction’s multiple linguistic properties. The few studies found in the literature on L2 acquisition of the BA construction by English-speaking learners have examined this issue from different perspectives. Honggang Jin (1992) viewed it as a process of pragmaticization from learners’ subject-prominent L1 (English) to the topic-prominent L2 (Chinese). Shenglan Zhang (2002) focused on the developmental patterns of the BA construction among English-speaking learners of Chinese. Hang

12

Introduction

Du (2004) examined the acquisition of two specific constraints of the BA construction, while Xiaohong Wen (2010) investigated the usage of a subcategory of the BA construction under explicit and implicit task instructions. Most of the studies found that L2 learners of Chinese produced fewer BA sentences than native speakers and at a lower accuracy rate. Most of the previous studies on BA acquisition, especially those conducted by scholars in Mainland China, examined L2 Chinese learners’ performance on specific forms that the BA construction can take by collecting data either from the L2 Chinese corpus or from survey-style questions. It was observed in those studies that L2 Chinese learners did better on some BA sentences than others. Is there any generalization that can be made from these findings? Can the acquisition of the BA construction be examined from a different perspective other than the form-based perspective? A look at some of the frameworks recently developed in the field of second language acquisition in general may provide some ideas. One of the recent developments in generative-based second language acquisition research is to investigate the divergence from native-like attainment where successful acquisition of abstract syntax is evident. In other words, the observed divergence may originate from domains outside of core syntax. Some research has investigated the interface domains, which, as Lydia White (2009) defines, “center[s] on how different modules of the interlanguage grammar relate to each other” (White 2009, 50). The main goal of research along this line is to investigate whether the divergence from native-like grammar originates from the interfaces between core syntax and other domains. One contribution to this area of research has been the Interface Hypothesis proposed in Sorace (2005, 2011) and Sorace and Serratrice (2009). The Interface Hypothesis splits the properties of syntax into “narrow” syntactic properties and “interface” syntactic properties. It predicts that those “narrow” or “pure” syntactic properties can be fully acquired by L2 learners. However, the properties that require the incorporation of syntactic knowledge and knowledge from other domains (e.g., semantics or discourse) quite possibly will never be completely acquired in L2 contexts. Sorace and Serratrice (2009) and Sorace (2011) further claim that the nature of different interfaces poses different challenges and creates different attainment patterns in L2 acquisition. Properties at syntax-semantics interfaces are acquirable whereas properties at syntax-pragmatics interfaces are problematic. Sorace claims that this split can be found among near-native L2 learners who have arrived at the final attainment state of their interlanguage. Although Sorace (2011) excludes intermediate L2 learners from the scope of what the Interface Hypothesis will predict, many scholars (White 2011; Lardiere 2011) question the wisdom of doing so. White (2011) encourages researchers to extend and test “the IH in

Introduction

13

domains where it was not originally intended to apply” (White 2011, 110). The first study in this book has taken this advice and investigated whether, in addition to explaining the ultimate acquisition among near-native speakers, the Interface Hypothesis can be extended to explain L2 development. The present study investigates whether this split can be observed among less advanced L2 learners. In other words, can this split be observed in the midphases of the interlanguage development process of L2 learners’ acquisition of grammar? The studies that examined the properties at various interfaces did not arrive at conclusive findings as far as the Interface Hypothesis is concerned. Some studies provided evidence for the “split” proposed by the Interface Hypothesis, claiming that the properties at the interfaces between syntax and other domains are extremely difficult and thus result in L2 divergence from native speakers’ grammar (Belletti, Bennati, and Sorace 2007; Belletti and Leonini 2004; Hopp 2004; Sorace 2004; Tsimpli and Sorace 2006, among others). However, other studies found that interface properties were also acquirable by L2 learners, and those who did acquire them were able to deploy them in a native-like manner (Borgonovo, Garavito, and Prevost 2005; Dekydtspotter and Sprouse 2001; Dekydtspotter, Sprouse, and Swanson 2001; Ivanov 2009). Other studies suggest that the divergence at interfaces is not domain wide, but variable dependent (Yuan 2010). The studies that examined the acquisition of the properties at interfaces or compared the acquisition of the “core” syntactic properties with properties at interfaces seem to arrive at different conclusions. Moreover, the target languages in those studies (with the exception of Yuan 2010) are mainly Romance languages, such as Italian and French, or Germanic languages, such as German. The target properties examined mainly focus on the null-subject parameter and the clustered properties within this parameter, such as the postverbal subject word order. How about the acquisition of a target language other than those target languages? And how about the acquisition of properties outside of the null-subject parameter? Further research is needed along this line to extend the range of investigation so that more evidence can be provided to attest to the generalizability of the Interface Hypothesis. As a framework developed in the past decade, the Interface Hypothesis needs more empirical evidence from a variety of combinations of L1 and L2. Nonetheless, it seems to be an appropriate framework within which to examine what is missing in the literature of BA construction acquisition. It enables us to predict the pattern of acquisition of the BA construction or to explain the discrepancy in terms of the nature of the properties to be acquired. A clearer picture of the acquisition of the BA construction is needed, and the interface perspective might bring us closer to the nature of the difficulties that L2 Chinese learners encounter while learning it. Only when the exact

14

Introduction

difficulties of the BA construction are identified can our understanding of the acquisition issue deepen, and more effective pedagogical strategies be accordingly developed. To date, to this researcher’s knowledge, no study has examined the acquisition of the BA construction from the perspective of “core” syntactic properties versus properties at interfaces. The present study undertook an examination of the different components of the BA construction with an eye toward improving pedagogical approaches through a more complete awareness. Specifically, it explored the following research questions: (1) In acquiring the BA construction in Chinese, does L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of its properties differ depending on which domains are involved, viz., either core-syntax or interfaces? If so, does the acquisition differ because of the nature of the interface domains? (2) Is the observed difference, if any, in acquisition of core syntax properties versus properties involving a particular interface domain wide or variable specific? As an extension of these questions, a follow-up study was conducted to explore learners’ awareness of BA sentences whose usage is obligatory versus other BA sentences whose usage is optional and is driven by pragmatic considerations.

INSTRUCTION OF THE BA CONSTRUCTION There is almost a consensus that the BA construction is very frustrating to both instructors and learners of Chinese as a foreign language (He 2007; Lu 2016; Lyu 2010; Tseng 2018; Zeng 2014, among others). It is frustrating for instructors because they spend so much time explaining what the BA construction is and having students practice using it, but students still do not fully grasp how to use it or when to use it. It is frustrating for students because so much time is spent on going through and practicing the BA construction, but a thorough understanding of its correct use remains elusive. Many researchers have observed and listed the issues with students’ acquisition of the BA construction, and these issues include not only grammar mistakes, such as word order, missing complements, or other elements, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the overuse of BA or the avoidance of BA (Jiang 1999; Li and Deng 2005; Liu 2003; Liu and Wang 2003; Xiong 1996; Yang 2012; Yu 2000). However, fewer studies have proposed specific approaches to help students overcome these challenges. Even fewer have done empirical investigation on the effectiveness of certain approaches. What makes the teaching and learning of the BA construction ineffective? Researchers argue that there are several reasons. First, the BA construction is a highly complex construction with different meanings and various constraints on the BA object, the verb phrase, the context, and so on. Second, textbooks fail to integrate into their explanations and design of exercises the

Introduction

15

most recent findings in linguistic and acquisition studies about the BA construction and seem to present different types of BA sentences in a more or less random order (Lu 2016; Lyu 2010; Meng 2009; Shi 2012; Wang 2009). Moreover, the exercises in those textbooks are sometimes mechanical and oversimplified, and they fail to help students develop their awareness of when to use the BA construction and when not to (Lu 2003; Zeng 2014). Last but not least, the way that the BA construction is taught and practiced in class is ineffective: instructors focus on the structure and the semantic meaning of the BA construction while ignoring its pragmatic and discourse features (He 2007; Liu 2010; Lyu 2010; Zhao 2006; Zhao 1994; Zhang 1991; Zhang and Liu 1994). This author argues that there are two issues to be aware of in the teaching of the BA construction: what features should be the focus of teaching, and how they should be taught. Influenced by the numerous linguistic studies that examine different types of BA sentences and their meanings and functions, many studies on how to facilitate learners’ acquisition of the BA construction in a classroom setting have explored which type of BA sentences should be introduced first (He 2007; Gao 1999; Li and Deng 2005; Lu 2003; Lu 2005; Ren 1998; Teng 1997; Wang 2011; Xie 2003). In other words, in what order should the BA construction be taught? They proposed their particular teaching orders based on different factors, including structure complexity (Teng 1997), semantic meanings (He 2007; Xie 2003; Zeng 2014), level of obligatoriness (Ren 1998), acquisition order and error rates (Gao 1999; Li and Deng 2005; Lu 2005), number of items involved in the event (Wang 2011), and a combination of different factors (Lu 2003). However, most of the studies are descriptive in nature and are based either on researchers’ observations and experiences or on corpus data or error analysis. Only one study (He 2007) examined the effectiveness of the proposed teaching order by using an experimental design. The author compared the learning outcomes among the experimental group and the traditional teaching group and found that the experimental group, which followed the proposed teaching order, did better than the traditional group as evidenced by their greater production of BA sentences and their higher accuracy rate. However, the teaching order of the traditional group was not controlled, and there was some overlap with the experimental group, which blurred the validity of the observed advantage. In addition, the native languages among the participants were not controlled either, making it harder to tease apart the effect of L1 transfer and the training effect. Compared with the studies that propose which type of BA sentences to teach at which stage, studies that explore how to teach those BA sentences are rare. Jianming Lu (2016) summarizes the basic procedure followed in most Chinese language classrooms regarding the BA construction: (1) introduce the format; (2) introduce the meaning of the BA construction; (3) introduce

16

Introduction

the components of the BA construction: the subject, the BA object, and the verb phrase; and (4) explain the position of the auxiliary verbs and negation (Lu 2016, 11). However, this descriptive and prescriptive instruction fails to help learners acquire this construction successfully. Lu argues that the failure and frustration originate from both a lack of comparison and an inadequate illustration of the differences between the BA construction and other structures (e.g., the topic-comment structure). He proposes that the construction be explained within the framework of language information structure and that activities should be designed accordingly. Many researchers have pointed out the importance of providing contexts to help students understand when the BA construction should be used (Ding 2007; Shi 2012; Sun 2010; Zhang and Liu 1994; Zhao 2006; Zhu 2020); however, other than giving a few examples, most of the studies do not provide any systematic procedure on how to do this. Some researchers suggest that students should be provided with BA sentences with errors so that they can correct them with their teacher’s help (Zhao 2006; Meng 2009; Wang 2009; Ding 2007). A few studies propose the use of videos as input or as prompts to elicit the production of BA sentences (Liu 2010; Zhang 2008). Only a handful of studies specifically discuss the in-class procedures and activities used to teach the BA construction. Xiaoli Ding (2007) proposes an “integrated” approach to teaching BA, that is, introducing the BA construction by using a classroom setting and then practicing, first, with controlled exercises (drilling), then moving on to less-controlled ones and then to communicative activities, and complementing these with error correction and comparing and contrasting BA sentences and regular SVO sentences (Ding 2007, 118). Hui Liu (2010) presents five steps used in classroom instruction to teach BA: (1) introducing how to make a Chinese dish; (2) finding the BA sentences used in this recipe; (3) playing a video of making this dish and asking students to restate the procedure using BA; (4) practicing using BA in groups; and (5) reviewing and working on BA exercises (Liu 2010, 53–54). Unfortunately, none of the above-mentioned studies examined the effectiveness of the teaching strategies they proposed. Yupeng Kou (2016) did an experimental study on the effectiveness of a teaching model he proposed in teaching five types of BA sentences to L2 Chinese learners at different proficiency levels. His teaching model was based on the grammar teaching theory of Focus-on-Form but involved input and communicative activities as well. He followed the pre-test-training-posttests (including a delayed post-test) model to collect data from four tasks: a grammaticality task, a cloze test, a translation task, and a sentence production task. He found that the teaching model he proposed helped students improve both their comprehension and their production of BA sentences. The gains in comprehension were well maintained, but the gains in production decreased later on. He also found that the gains varied across the different types of BA

Introduction

17

sentences. His study provides detailed information on how well-planned instruction can help L2 Chinese learners understand and produce the BA construction. However, his teaching model is an integrated approach that involves input, communicative activities, and instruction of pedagogical grammar, rather than focusing on one particular instruction method. What is the pivotal factor that determines the success of the whole process? The present study attempted to zoom in on one particular instructional approach that focuses on input and learners’ processing of input. Miao-fen Tseng (2018) did a longitudinal study on the effectiveness of the teaching strategies she used with different groups of L2 Chinese learners over a four-year period by measuring the number of BA sentences produced in their essays and the accuracy rates of the BA sentences they produced. Her teaching strategy was also based on the Focus-on-Form theory, combined with plenty of input, an emphasis on output, and formative assessment and feedback. She found that both learners’ production of BA sentences and their accuracy in using the BA construction increased over the years. The encouraging results of this study indicate the way revised teaching strategies can facilitate the acquisition of the BA construction among L2 Chinese learners. However, this study also involved many factors in the process, and the groups of learners changed each year, which made it harder to exclude other factors that might have contributed to the changes observed—factors such as individual differences, assignment requirements, and so forth. The present study explored the effectiveness of the Processing Input (PI) instruction model in facilitating the acquisition of the BA construction among learners of Chinese at beginning to intermediate proficiency levels. In particular, this study explored how effective PI helped learners establish form-meaning matching in terms of 1) the word order of the BA construction and the semantic meaning of BA sentences, and 2) the semantic relation between the BA object and the verb phrase as the predicate. The effectiveness was measured through two tasks: (1) a judgment task, in which participants were asked to decide if the meaning of a Chinese sentence and an English sentence matched, and (2) a production task, in which participants were asked to describe pairs of pictures in one Chinese sentence. PI instruction, as a pedagogical intervention, was proposed by VanPatten (1993), and Cadierno (1995), and was later expanded in VanPatten (1996 and 2002) and Wong (2004b). It was proposed on the basis of research in second language acquisition and on a model of learners’ processing of input, in particular (VanPatten 1993, 1996, and 2002). It has been found that learners follow certain principals and use particular strategies while processing the input and trying to map the form with meaning from the input. However, those strategies do not necessarily always facilitate the correct mapping of meaning and form in the target language. PI therefore claims that instructors should give

18

Introduction

learners explicit instruction on strategies they should avoid while processing the input in addition to giving explicit instruction on the target grammar. More than that, PI also emphasizes practice based on a flood of manipulated input (also known as structured input). The input should be manipulated in a way that learners will be forced to stop using the strategies they are naturally inclined to use and, instead, start to notice the target form-meaning mapping. For example, when learners of English hear the sentence They listened to some music last night, they are likely to map the past event with the time phrase last night instead of the past tense form of the verb –ed. If the time phrase is removed and learners are asked to decide if this activity has already happened or not, they will be forced to pay attention to the form –ed and the meaning of a past event. Previous research has claimed that the most important part of PI is not the explicit instruction part but its structured input. However, other studies emphasize the important role explicit instruction plays. Meanwhile, more recent research in language teaching has begun to highlight the importance of instant and corrective feedback. The present study not only investigated if the regular PI approach was effective but also compared the effectiveness of explicit instruction and instant corrective feedback. Specifically, the present study addressed the following two research questions: (1) Is the PI approach effective in helping L2 Chinese learners establish the form-meaning mapping of the BA construction? and (2) Which part, if any, is more successful in helping students to establish this mapping: explicit instruction or instant corrective feedback during the PI procedure? The organization of the present monograph is as follows. Chapter 1 summarizes the linguistic studies that have examined the properties of the BA construction, including BA, the BA NP, the VP, the subject in the BA construction, the semantic meanings of the construction, the discourse meaning of the construction, and so on. Chapter 2 summarizes and discusses previous research on the acquisition of the BA construction among L2 learners of Chinese. Chapter 3 reviews previous studies that propose ways to teach the BA construction to students in different learning environments. Chapter 4 reports L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of the BA construction regarding the properties that call for knowledge from different domains. Chapter 5 reports on the study that investigated learners’ awareness of two different types of BA sentences: those that do not have an SVO counterpart and whose usage is obligatory and those that have a SVO counterpart and thus are used out of pragmatic considerations. Chapter 6 reports on the effectiveness of using the PI model to teach the BA construction, with a focus on the properties that L2 learners have more difficulty with as identified in the acquisition study reported in chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 7 summarizes the findings from the studies reported in this monograph, discusses the implications they have on our understanding of the acquisition of the BA construction, and provides some guidelines for the teaching of the BA construction.

Chapter 1

The BA Construction

CHAPTER INTRODUCTION This chapter goes into more depth about the BA construction. It starts with a brief overview of the history and development of the BA construction and continues with a discussion of the unique properties of the different aspects and the constraints that must be respected in order for a BA sentence to be linguistically correct and pragmatically appropriate. It also provides a look at the BA construction from a usage-based construction grammar perspective, and it concludes with an analysis of the different types of sentences in which the BA construction is used. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BA CONSTRUCTION IN CHINESE: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION In his book A Draft History of Chinese (1988), Li Wang, the well-known Chinese linguist, lists the BA construction as one of five major changes in Chinese grammar to have occurred over the course of history. Most scholars (e.g., Shi 2002; Wang 1988; Wang 1987; Xu 2006) agree that the BA construction developed from a serial verb construction and did not come into being until the Tang Dynasty (around 1000 A.D.). The word 把ba was originally used as a verb that meant “to take or hold” (Li 2001; Shi 2002; Wang 1988). For example:

19

20

1)

Chapter 1

相 待 甚 厚, 临别 把臂 言誓 xiang dai shen hou, lin bie ba bi yan shi. Towards treat very good at departure hold arm say oath “(a person) was very well-treated; at parting, he held the host’s arm and swore an oath” From Houhanshu Lubuzhuan, cited in Wang 1988, 537.

Later, the word ba underwent a grammaticalization process and became a functional word (Shi 2002; Wang 1987). The following is an example from a Tang Dynasty poem of its use in its new form: 2)

莫 把 杭州 刺史 欺 mo ba hangzhou Cishi qi Not BA a place an officer deceive “Don’t deceive the chief executive officer of Hangzhou” From Bai Juyi, cited in Wang 1988, 540.

However, scholars disagree on the motivations that led to the appearance of the BA construction. Dan Xu argues that the appearance of the BA construction was motivated by the need for Chinese to shift from “a language in which different devices coexisted into a language in which syntactic devices became a dominant and almost unique device in indicating grammatical functions.” (Xu 2006, 138). Both Shi (2002) and Wang (1988) claim that the grammaticalization of BA and the appearance and development of the BA construction were closely related to the formation of the resultative construction in Chinese. Whatever the reasons, the BA construction was finally established around the twelfth century (Shi 2002). That point marks the start of its journey as a unique construction in Chinese, a construction that has undergone some development throughout history. At first, the BA construction could be paired with a predicate consisting of a bare verb. Later, a constraint was put into place: the predicate must be a complex one, one that is usually realized in a verb with a resultative complement (a RVC phrase). The use of the BA construction also increased as the use of RVC phrases became more frequent. Xiliang Cui collected examples of the BA construction from two novels: one written more than 250 years ago, and the other, contemporary. The occurrences of the BA construction in each were counted, and a significant increase in their occurrence was found. In the ancient novel, there was a roughly 1:1 ratio of ba and jiang (another particle that indicates a similar meaning), whereas in the contemporary work, the ratio reflected a significant change: 10:1 把ba to 将jiang (Cui 1995, 13).

21

The BA Construction

SYNTACTIC PROPERTIES OF THE BA CONSTRUCTION Li (2001) represents the forms of a BA sentence as shown in 3)a and b below. A BA sentence has an optional subject, followed by ba and the noun phrase (NP), followed by the verb (V) and an X element, as in 3)a. The X element can be realized in different forms: a resultative complement, an aspect marker (e.g., le), a locative complement, and so on. In some cases, the X element can come before the verb, as in 3)b. 3)  a. (NP) + BA + NP + V + X    b. (NP) + BA + NP + X + V 4)a is an example of 3)a in which the subject wo is followed by a BA phrase and then followed by a complex verb phrase (V+X). The X element in 4)a is postverbal and is realized by a resultative complement, wan (to finish). 4)b is an example of 3)b in which the X element is preverbal and is realized by the adverb yi to indicate the briefness of the action. When the X element takes the preverbal position, it is usually realized as an adverb (Li 2001, 2). 4)

a. 我 把 那 本 书 Wo ba na ben shu I BA that CL book “I finished reading that book.” b. 他 把 我 一 推 Ta ba wo yi tui, He BA I one shove “He gave me a shove, then (he) left.”

看 kan read

完 了 wan le. finish ASP

就 jiu then

走 了 zou le. leave ASP

Although the X element can occupy either the postverbal or preverbal position, in real use, the X element occupies the postverbal position in most BA sentences. Jing-Schmidt’s (2005) corpus-based study of the BA construction shows that, among all the BA sentences, only 1% has a preverbal X element (Jing-Schmidt 2005, 140). For this reason, this study will focus only on the BA sentences with a postverbal X element. The purely syntactic constraints of the BA construction are not very complicated in and of themselves. The most obvious syntactic constraint is the word order constraint, which results in a noncanonical word order. A regular Chinese sentence takes the SVO order: the subject goes first, followed by a verb phrase, with the object taking the postverbal position. However, in a

22

Chapter 1

BA sentence, the noun phrase introduced by 把ba (the BA-NP) always goes before the verb. 5)a is an example of a regular Chinese SVO sentence in which the object, 车che (car), follows the verb phrase, 卖了mai le (to sold). However, in a BA sentence, the object, in this case, 车che (car), cannot appear in the postverbal position, as shown in the grammatically incorrect 5) b, but must move to the preverbal position as shown in 5)c: 5)

a.

他 卖 了 他 ta mai le ta He sell ASP he “He sold his car.”

b. * 他 卖 了 ta mai le He sell ASP c. 他 把 他 ta ba ta He BA he “He sold his car.”

的 de POSS

把 ba BA 的 de POSS

他 ta he 车 che car

车 che. car 的 de POSS 卖 mai sell

车 che. car 了。 le. ASP

SEMANTIC PROPERTIES OF THE BA CONSTRUCTION In order for a BA sentence to be grammatically acceptable, it must conform to certain semantic constraints. As there has been no agreement on the forms that the X element can take, there have been debates on the semantic properties that the BA construction indicates. Some of the most wellknown accounts include the disposal account, the causative account, and more recently, the displacement account. Each account attempts to cover as many types of BA sentences as possible, and each one seems to claim that it has the strongest explanatory power regarding the constraints on the BA construction. However, each account seems to have its own strengths and weaknesses. In the following sections, the most discussed accounts are reviewed. The Disposal Account The disposal or “executive” account, initially proposed by the well-known Chinese linguist Li Wang (1945), is the first attempt to generalize the semantic meaning of the BA construction. Wang calls it “the disposal form” (chuzhi

23

The BA Construction

shi) and explains that “the disposal form states how a person is handled, manipulated, or dealt with; how something is disposed of; or how an affair is conducted” (translated by Y.-C. Li 1974). This proposal was made based on the original meaning of 把ba, “to take or hold.” Huan Wang (1984) supports the disposal account but points out that the term “disposal” should be understood in a broader sense, as indicating the relationship between the verb and the object, a relationship that does not necessarily involve a purpose on the part of the subject. She claims that, under the influence of the action denoted by the verb, the noun phrase introduced by BA undergoes some change and takes on a certain state. Li and Thompson (1981) further claim that the influence the verb has on the BA NP does not have to be physical; it can refer to an abstract influence as well. Li (2001) proposes the notion of “affectedness” and points out that the BA construction can be understood as a “highly transitive” construction in which the verb exerts “a high degree of affectedness” on the object. She illustrates her idea of “affectedness” with the following example 6): 6)

a.

b.

我 把 锅子 装 wo ba guozi zhuang I BA pot fill “I filled the pot with water.” 我 把 水 装 wo ba shui zhuang I BA water fill “I poured the water into the pot.”

了 le ASP

水。 shui. water

锅子 guozi pot

里。 li. in.

In 6)a, the pot, which is the BA NP, is affected in the sense that it now contains water; whereas in 6)b, the water is affected in the sense that its location has changed: now it is in the pot. Hongqi Wang (2003) agrees that the semantic meaning of the BA construction should be “disposal,” but he also clarifies that here “disposal” means “controlled causation,” which indicates that the BA NP is under the control of the subject and is affected by the action carried out by the subject. The sense of “control” does not have to be true in the real world but only has to be true from the speaker’s perspective (Wang 2003, 38). To sum up, both the original disposal account and the extended or modified disposal account emphasize the affectedness on the part of the BA NP as a result of the action denoted by the verb phrase. Though its name might sound a bit confusing, the disposal account, with some modifications since it was first proposed, captures the basic meaning of the BA construction, as well

24

Chapter 1

as the constraints on it. It also distinguishes the BA construction from other SVO sentence types. However, within this account the notion of disposal or affectedness remains somewhat vague. A better-defined notion through future studies would be welcome. The Causative Account Rint Sybesma (1992) attempts to give a well-defined meaning of the BA construction by analyzing it as a variety of the causative construction (an accomplishment sentence), in which “the subject causes the ba-NP to undergo the event denoted by the VP.” (Sybesma 1992, 178). In his proposal, there is no actual distinction between the BA construction and the causative construction. And it is true that some BA sentences do indicate a causative meaning, as the following example shows: 7)

那 件 事 把 我 na jian shi ba wo That CL event BA I “That event made me feel so worried.”

急 ji worry

坏 huai bad

了。 le. ASP

However, most linguists (Wang 1984; Wang 2003; Zhu 1982, among others) argue that this type of BA sentence is not as frequently used as the ones that indicate the meaning of disposal or affectedness. Liu (1997) gives examples in which an accomplishment sentence cannot occur using the BA construction. A. Li (2001) points out another problem in Sybesma’s proposal, this one concerning the relationship between the BA NP and the resultative complement. Sybesma proposes that the BA NP and the resultative complement form a small clause, and the BA NP is always the subject of that small clause. However, A. Li (2001) gives examples of BA sentences in which the subject of the small clause is the subject of the whole sentence instead of just the BA NP as illustrated in the following example (example from A. Li 2001): 8)

他 把 你 想 得 饭 都 不 肯 ta ba ni xiang de fan dou bu ken He BA you miss PART de1 food even no will “He misses you so much that he won’t even eat his meals.”

吃。 chi. eat

The BA Construction

25

In 8), it is the subject of the whole sentence, he, and not the BA NP you, who does not want to eat meals. Moreover, there are cases in which the BA sentence does not have a small clause as the verb complement. For example, 9)

他 把 那 个 ta ba na ge He BA that CL “He ate that apple.”

苹果 pingguo apple

吃 了。 chi le. eat ASP

In 9), the verb eat is followed by the aspect marker le to indicate the completion of the action, which implies that the apple is now gone. It does not make sense to take the BA NP that apple as the subject of the aspect marker le. To sum up, the causative account makes an attempt to give a more clear-cut meaning of the BA construction by using a structural analysis. It works for most of the BA sentences that indicate a causative relationship between the subject and the object. However, this account leaves a majority of BA sentences out. The Complex Verb Constraint Despite their differences, both accounts agree that a verb must take another grammatical unit in order to form a grammatical BA sentence (Li 2002; Shi 2002; Wang 1987, among others). This is referred to in the present study as the complex verb constraint. In a BA sentence, the predicate cannot be a bare verb, that is, a verb that appears by itself, but must take another grammatical unit known as the X element (Li 2001; Liu 1997; Lyu 1980; Sybesma 1992). This constraint did not originate with the BA construction but developed with the formation of the resultative construction in Chinese (Shi 2002). The postverbal X element in a BA sentence can be realized in different forms. However, there is no consensus on the number of forms the X element can take. This has, necessarily, been a topic of some importance in the literature on the BA construction. Moreover, most research is descriptive in nature and lists the possible forms: Lyu (1955) lists 13 patterns, while Sybesma (1992) lists 10 patterns based on Lyu’s patterns. Li (2001) discusses in detail the forms that the X element can take. Some of the most frequently used forms of the X element will be illustrated in examples in the following section. One of the most typical forms that the postverbal X element can take is that of a resultative complement. Shi (2002) points out that, unlike the resultatives in other languages, a resultative complement in Chinese is, in itself, a verb

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or an adjective. Shi (2002) thinks that the term resultative should “refer to the state, degree, accomplishment, achievement, or effect of the action” (Shi 2002, 29). Li and Thompson (1981) define the resultative complement and the verb preceding it in this way: “A two-element verb compound is called a resultative verb compound (RVC) if the second element signals some result of the action or process conveyed by the first element” (Li and Thompson 1981, 54–55). RVC phrases are very common in Chinese. Shi (2002) claims that the formation of RVC phrases has a profound impact on Chinese grammar. As a result, many syntactic constructions require an RVC phrase as their predicate in order to be grammatical. These include the BA construction. Sentence 10) is an example in case: 10) 请 把 书 放 qing ba shu fang Please BA book put “Please put the book away.”

好。 hao. good

In the example above, the main verb is fang, and hao is the resultative complement that goes with the verb to indicate the result of the action. Without the resultative complement hao, 10) would be ungrammatical. Some resultative complements in Chinese are very productive, and, as Shi (2002) points out, they can technically be paired with any verb as long as the RVC phrase makes sense. The X element can also frequently appear as a complement of place taking the form of a prepositional phrase. Usually, a verb that denotes the meaning of displacement (or the “placement verbs” as Li (2001) calls them) will go with a complement of place to indicate the destination of the displacement, as example 11) illustrates: 11) 他 把 书 放 在 ta ba shu fang zai He BA book put at “He put the book on the desk.”

桌 zhuo desk

上。 shang. on

In 11), the preposition zai takes zhuo shang to form the complement of place that goes with the verb fang to indicate the destination of the action of putting. Other prepositions that can be paired with a place to form a complement of place include dao (to/ toward) and wang (toward).

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Other forms that the X element can take include indirect object, retained object, aspect marker (in most cases, le), and so forth. In this study, the focus will be on the resultative complement, or RVC, and the complement of place. The resultative complement was chosen because it is a typical form paired with the main verb. As reported by Jing-Schmidt (2005), 25.7% of the BA sentences in her corpus-based study had resultative complements in their predicates (Jing-Schmidt 2005, 140). The complement of place, realized in a prepositional phrase, is the focus here because the BA construction is obligatory in this case. This obligatoriness will be discussed in detail later. PRAGMATIC AND DISCOURSE PROPERTIES OF THE BA CONSTRUCTION Compared with studies on the syntactic and semantic properties of the BA construction, far fewer studies have focused on its pragmatic or discourse properties. Some of these studies have investigated the logical relationship between a BA sentence and the clauses before or after it; others have investigated the discourse function that the BA construction achieves. In the following sections, some of these studies are reviewed. Discourse Properties of the BA Construction as a Whole Wangxi Zhang (1991) examined the BA construction within its contexts. He claims that Chinese is a language that largely relies on the “combination of underlying meanings,” which makes it extremely important to understand the logical relationship between clauses. He collected 1,188 BA sentences from modern and contemporary Chinese literature across different genres and found that 58.67% of them were closely related to the clause that appeared either before or after it, or, in some cases, to both. Based on the data from his corpus, Zhang argues that the core pragmatic property of the BA construction is to indicate a purpose-related meaning. He thus proposes this “standard context” in which a BA construction occurs: Clause 1 (to indicate cause) + the BA construction (means) + Clause 2 (to indicate purpose)

Zhang argues that the BA construction indicates that something is done for a particular reason, and the completion of that action will fulfill a purpose (p. 91). He claims that there is either a cause-and-effect relationship or a meansto-an-end relationship in the context. When these logical relationships are to be emphasized, the BA construction is preferred (Zhang 1991, 99).

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Zhang also generalizes the pragmatic aspect of the BA construction when it is used “independently.” When the purpose of the action, the result of the action, or the subjectivity of the action is to be emphasized, the BA construction is preferred (Zhang 1991, 95). Zhang’s (1991) study is among the earliest ones to emphasize the contextual meaning and to propose a core pragmatic property of the BA construction. However, his study is descriptive, and more evidence is needed to test its explanatory power. Jing-Schmidt (2005) explores the pragmatic function of the BA construction from the perspective of how it helps realize the speaker’s communicative intent. Based on a corpus-based discourse analysis of the BA construction, she proposes that the BA construction is a discourse strategy for achieving high dramaticity. Discourse dramaticity, according to Jing-Schmidt, refers to “the effect produced by utterances that impresses the perception and/or activates the imagination and the emotion in communication” (Jing-Schmidt 2005, 114). When a speaker intends to achieve high discourse dramaticity, the BA construction is used; otherwise, a non-BA construction is used. Examples she uses to illustrate her point follow: 12) a.

b.

-- 你 怎么 这么 高兴？ -- ni zenme zheme gaoxing? -- you how come so happy?2 “How is it that you are so happy?” -- 我 把 张三 打 了。 -- wo ba zhangsan da le. -- I BA Zhangsan hit ASP “I hit Zhangsan.” -- 你 好像 心 里 有 鬼， 干 什么 坏事 啦？ -- ni haoxiang Xin li you gui, gan shenme huaishi la? -- you seem heart in have ghost do what bad thing Q3 “You have a guilty look; what bad thing did you do?” -- 我 打 张三 了。 -- Wo da zhangsan le. -- I hit Zhangsan ASP “I hit Zhangsan.” Examples from Jing-Schmidt 2005, 2.

The BA Construction

29

Jing-Schmidt claims that the sentences in 12)a and 12)b fulfill different communication intents. In 12)a, where the BA construction is used in the reply, the speaker wants to highlight hitting Zhangsan, indicating pride in the act and a desire to draw the listener’s attention to it. On the other hand, in 12)b, when replying to the question, the speaker does not want to emphasize hitting Zhangsan and may even be trying to hide that fact; hence the use of a non-BA construction. Jing-Schmidt’s (2005) study is the first book-length attempt to investigate the pragmatic and discourse functions that the BA construction fulfills. It provides a new perspective on the BA construction’s discourse function within a theoretical framework of communication and human psychology, namely, the system of discourse dramaticity. However, the notion of “discourse dramaticity” is not so well-defined. Moreover, this discourse-dramaticity account does not exclude the use of other constructions such as the passive construction or the topic comment construction to achieve a similar discourse function. In 12) a, for example, the sense of “bragging” or “pride” can just as well be achieved using a passive voice construction. Ning Li and Xiaoshan Wang’s (2001) corpus-based study investigates the pragmatic functions of the BA construction within the framework of the speech act. After conducting a quantitative analysis of the BA sentences, they argue that the main pragmatic functions of the BA construction are exposition, instruction, expression, and declaration (Li and Wang 2001, 55). All the proposals discussed above provide new perspectives on the BA construction as a whole unit and also call researchers’ attention to the role the BA construction plays within the discourse context. Discourse and Pragmatic Properties of the Elements in the BA Construction Another group of studies focuses on a particular element of the BA construction and examines the role that this particular element plays within the discourse context. The element that has been the focus of most studies is the BA NP. Lixin Jin’s (1997) data-driven analysis of the BA construction in discourse contexts argues that a BA sentence is preferred when the BA NP is a coreferent of the object noun phrase in the previous sentence. Sentence 13) illustrates his proposal (example from Jin 1997, 419):

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Chapter 1

13) a. * 爸爸 买 了 一 盆 花， 他 在 阳台 上 *baba mai Le yi pen hua, ta zai yangtai shang dad buy ASP one CL flower he at porch on 放 着 这 盆 花。 fang zhe zhe pen hua. put ASP4 this CL flower “Dad bought a pot of flowers and put it on the porch.” b.

爸爸 买 了 一 盆 花， 他 把 这 盆 花 baba mai le yi pen hua, ta ba zhe pen hua dad buy ASP one CL flower he BA this CL flower 放 在 阳台 上。 fang zai yangtai Shang. put at porch on “Dad bought a pot of flowers and put it on the porch.”

Native speakers consider 13)a an awkward sentence and prefer 13)b. Jin explains this preference in terms of discourse cohesion; in order to shorten the distance between the two co-referents, speakers are likely to use the BA construction to prepose the object. There is also some debate on the focus of the BA construction. Cui (1995) claims that the verb phrase in the BA construction is the focus, and the focus within the verb phrase is the complement that modifies the verb. His point of view is illustrated in the following example: 14)

他 把 镜子 打 ta ba jingzi da He BA mirror hit “He broke the mirror.”

碎 sui smashed

了 le. ASP

According to Cui’s proposal, the focus of 14) is the verb phrase: 打碎da sui, in which 打da (to hit) is the verb, and 碎sui (smashed) is the resultative complement. Cui argues that, because the BA construction describes the change that occurs to the BA NP and not the action itself, the complement sui, rather than the verb, da, is the focus. Fengsheng Xue (1987) goes even further along this line by proposing the complement as the “head” of the verb phrase and treating the verb as a modifier or adverb of manner to indicate how the state comes into being.

The BA Construction

31

Jin (1997) disagrees with Cui (1995) and Xue (1987) on this issue. He claims, instead, that when the BA NP is the focus, the BA construction will be used. Both accounts can explain some BA sentences but not all of them. Focus, thus, does not seem to be a typical pragmatic function of the BA construction; what seems to be a more typical pragmatic property is the discourse feature of topic. Some scholars claim that the BA NP is the topic in the BA construction (Chen 1983; Tsao 1987; Xue 1987). Xue (1987) proposes a unified definition of the BA construction: A + BA + B + VP He claims that the BA construction describes the state of B (the BA NP), with A (usually the subject) as the direct (in most cases) or indirect cause that leads to B’s current situation (Xue 1987, 16). He also claims that the VP must be “a descriptive statement about B’s condition as a result of a certain action” (Xue 1987, 6). In this aspect, he shares with Sybesma the idea of a “causative account” (Sybesma 1992) relationship between the BA NP and the VP, though their views on the internal structure of the VP differ. Based on his analysis of the syntactic and semantic properties of the BA construction, Xue thus argues that the B in this BA format must be the main topic of the construction (Xue 1987, 12) and that part A is optional in the construction and can, therefore, only be a secondary topic (Xue 1987, 14). Gwang-tsai Chen (1983) agrees with Xue (1987) and claims that the BA NP is, indeed, a topic. The VP in the construction serves as a comment that describes what has happened or will happen to the BA NP. Unlike an SVO sentence, which usually describes what the subject has done or will do, the subject in the BA construction is not the most important element, rather it is the impact on the BA NP as a result of the action indicated in the verb phrase. Chen also points out that the topic-comment structure account of the pragmatic property of the BA construction is a key element in helping learners of Chinese understand and use the BA construction appropriately. Fengfu Tsao (1987) agrees with Chen (1983) and Xue (1987) that the BA NP functions as a topic. He compares the properties of a regular topic in Chinese with the properties a BA NP and concludes that, with the exception of one aspect, the two share all the properties; they differ only in that a BA NP allows, under special circumstances, a specific reading, whereas a regular topic does not. Tsao considers the BA NP a special type of topic and calls it “the ba topic” (p. 11). Some of the properties of a BA NP include: a. the BA NP can extend its semantic domain to more than one sentence. b. the BA NP is in control of all the pronominalization and coreferential NP deletion processes in a BA topic chain.

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Chapter 1

These properties are illustrated in the following examples (from Tsao 1987, 9): 15) a.

b.

王 小姐 把 书 涨 了 价 再 卖 给 我们 Wang xiaojie ba shu zhang le jia zai mai gei women. Wang Miss BA book raise ASP price then sell to we “Miss Wang raised the price of the book before she sold it to us.” 王 小姐 把 书 涨 了 价 再 把 它卖 jia zai ba tai mai Wang xiaojie ba shui zhang le Wang Miss BA book raise ASP price then BA it sell 给 我们 gei women. to we “Miss Wang raised the price of the book before she sold it to us.”

In 15)b, the first BA NP (the book) is the head of the topic chain and controls the distribution or appearance of the second BA NP (it). The second BA NP is a co-referent of the first BA NP and can be omitted without incurring any change in meaning. The fact that the second BA NP is a co-referent indicates the BA NP is a topic because it extends its role to the successive clauses. Frances Li (1977) explores the discourse property of the BA construction in terms of “communicative value” or the information structure: “By moving the informationally light definite objects into the topic position of the sentence, ba makes room for the verbal elements to occupy the communicatively prominent sentence-final position” (cited in Wang 1987, 43–44). To sum up, within the limited research on the pragmatic properties of the BA construction, several studies claim that the BA NP of the BA construction acts either as the topic of the sentence or as the topic in the discourse. This proposal can explain most of the typical BA sentences. The properties of a topic in Chinese are well defined, and thus the topic proposal is more testable than other proposals that are from a communication and cognition perspective or a logical relation perspective. The study reported in the next two chapters adopted this proposal and explored how well this discourse and pragmatic property was acquired by L2 Chinese learners. UNDERSTANDING THE BA CONSTRUCTION FROM THE CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR PERSPECTIVE Construction Grammar Construction Grammar emerged in the 1980s as a new approach to grammatical analysis. Construction Grammar refers to a group of theories that consider

The BA Construction

33

form-meaning pairings as the core of human languages. Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale (2013) summarized the notion of construction shared by various frameworks of construction grammar as “the idea that arbitrary form-meaning pairing might not only be a useful concept for describing words and morphemes but that perhaps all levels of grammatical description involve such conventionalized form-meaning pairings’ (Hoffmann and Trousdale 2013, 1). Construction grammar originated as a reaction to generative linguistics, including Universal Grammar (UG) and minimalism. Generative linguistics propose that surface structures are derived from underlying structures, which makes it possible for children to acquire their first language with limited input (a.k.a. poverty of stimulus). They thus propose an innate mechanism for language learning (UG) so that language can be acquired with minimum input. However, UG cannot explain idiomatic expressions that vary hugely in different languages. Therefore, the UG approach mainly focuses on what can be explained within the framework of derivation and ignores the idiomatic structures outside of the “core.” Construction grammar argues against the transformation theory and claims that every structure is what we see and is not derived from other structures. Different structures are different pairings of meaning and form. This view on language makes it possible to examine all constructions in languages, including idiomatic expressions. Adele Goldberg (2013) identifies some underlying assumptions in construction grammar that are shared by all construction grammarians and thus distinguish them from the generative grammarians. First, phrases and clauses are analyzed as constructions. Second, there is a direct association between meaning and the surface form, without transformation from a deep structure. Third, constructions of different size and complexity are stored in networks. Fourth, constructions are motivated by functional and cognitive practices. Adele Goldberg (1995) established the key concepts of construction grammar by examining the argument structure construction. She argued that the meaning of argument structure cannot be predicted from the verb and the arguments it carries as generative linguistics proposed. Instead, she proposed a construction grammar approach to argument structure. She provided evidence from sentences whose interpretation was constrained by constructions, rather than by the verbs. In her 1995 book, she defined construction as follows: C is a CONSTRUCTION if and only if C is a form-meaning pair such that some aspect of Fi or some aspect of Si is not strictly predictable from C’s component parts or from other previously established constructions. (Goldberg 1995, 4)

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She broadened her definition in her 2006 book as follows: Any linguistic pattern is recognized as a construction as long as some aspect of its form or function is not strictly predictable from its component parts or from other constructions recognized to exist. In addition, patterns are stored as constructions even if they are fully predictable as long as they occur with sufficient frequency. (Goldberg 2006, 5)

An even more inclusive definition of construction was proposed in Goldberg (2019) as follows: Constructions are understood to be emergent clusters of lossy memory traces that are aligned with our high- (hyper!) dimensional conceptual space on the basis of shared form, function, and contextual dimensions. (Goldberg 2019, 7)

All the definitions proposed above actually indicate that construction can refer to words, syntactic categories, idioms, and so on. This is known as the syntax-lexicon continuum, and it has the concrete word and lexicon on one end and the abstract argument structure construction on the other end: word/ lexicon < syntactic category < fixed expressions/idioms < subcategorization frame < argument structure construction. A sentence is seen as a combination of constructions. For example, Mary gave the dog a treat includes the following constructions: a) Mary, the, dog, gave, a, treat b) VP, NP constructions c) Subject + Verb + Object 1 + Object 2 construction d) Double-object construction (X transfers Z to Y) Different constructionist frameworks have been developed over the past few decades. These frameworks originated with a group of grammarians at UC-Berkeley who attempted to find an approach that could integrate the analysis and description of both core and peripheral structures in language. They started by examining noncanonical and idiomatic structures. For example, George Lakoff (1987) examined the “there-construction” as Case Study 3 in his book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, and he argued that some odd grammatical properties come from the pragmatic meaning of the construction. He also argued that the meaning of the whole construction was not a combination of the meanings of the components, but rather, that the constructions themselves have meanings. This framework is now known as Berkeley Construction Grammar (BCG). Other frameworks have been proposed more recently, including the

The BA Construction

35

Fluid Construction Grammar (Luc Steels), Embodied Construction Grammar (Benjamin Bergen and Nancy Chang), and usage-based frameworks (Adele Goldberg, William Croft, and Ronald Langacker). Usage-based construction grammar has gained increasing attention and been broadly used over the past several years to analyze different constructions. Usage-based construction grammar argues that language is learned with general cognitive mechanisms and processes, including attention, analogy and association, generalization, and categorization, among others. The usage-based approach was proposed by Langacker (1988) to highlight the dynamic feature of linguistic structures driven by language uses, which bridges the development of linguistic features and conceptual structures in general. It challenges the distinction between language system and use, or competence and performance. It also discards the set of primitive categories such as subject and noun phrases, which are regularly needed for linguistic analysis. As Holger Diessel (2015) summarizes, the usage-based approach analyzes linguistic structures under two principles: First, linguistic structures are analyzed as the combination of a specific structural pattern with a particular function. Second, all linguistic signs are interconnected via various types of links (Diessel 2015, 296). The way in which words are encoded by syntactic organization can have an impact on the meaning of the phrases and the whole construction. In this sense, no syntactic organizations are identical. This is known as the Principle of No Synonymy of Grammatical Forms (Langacker 1988). Goldberg (2019) summarizes some frequently discussed Argument Structure constructions, including Doubleobject construction, Way construction, Intransitive motion construction, Caused-motion construction, Resultative construction, Transitive causative construction, Rely-on construction, and Communication conative construction (Goldberg 2019, 35). Refer to her book Explain Me This for a more detailed discussion of these constructions, including form, meaning, and examples. Analyzing the BA Construction Using the Construction Grammar Framework The consensus that the BA construction in Chinese is a unique linguistic structure makes construction grammar seem a fitting tool for analysis. One benefit of using construction grammar as a tool to analyze the BA construction is that it circumvents any controversies about the construction that might arise from any generative linguistic perspective. The first study that applied construction grammar to the BA construction, as far as this author can find, was reported in a dissertation paper written by Xinhua Wu (1999). In his study, he built a corpus from 14 contemporary novels in Mandarin Chinese and collected 1,287 BA sentences to analyze. He grouped these BA sentences into 20 subclasses.

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Chapter 1

After examining and re-examining the data, Wu defined the BA construction as a “Mode-prominent Complex Affectedness” construction. He also proposed a binary representation (meaning and form) for the BA construction in general. His representation includes the following constituents (Wu 1999, 173–175): a) the BA construction is an independent construction; b) the semantic representation of the BA construction includes manner or goal, affect or cause, and/or change, the meanings of all of which refer to a broader sense; c) two argument roles are involved in the meaning of the construction: the agent, which is not profiled, and the patient, whose role is profiled; d) the potential verbal expressions include a primary verb (obligatorily fused with affectedness or causality), a pre-verbal complement, and/or a postverbal complement (not obligatorily fused with manner, goal, or change); e) there is at least a pre-verbal complement or a post-verbal complement that must be used; f) there are grammatical relations, including subject and BA NP; g) the presence or absence of a pre- or post-verbal complement is determined by the predicate; h) the patient role is linked to the BA NP, and the agent role is linked to the subject. Wu analyzed the relations among the BA constructions by using the inheritance link framework proposed by Goldberg (1995), and he proposed a “structured hierarchy of inheritance linking relation” (Wu 1999, 225). He argued that the general BA construction and the two major classes of the BA construction formed a “mother-daughter inheritance link” that shows that the daughters are instances of the mother (instance link) (Wu 1999, 183). The one that has an obligatory pre-verbal complement is referred to as Major class 1, and the other, with its obligatory post-verbal complement, is referred to as Major class 2. Eighteen subclasses are listed under Major class 2. Wu identified the canonical class based on occurrence frequency and argued that this was the mother construction of Major class 2. He proposed that other subclasses under Major class 2 came together to create a few clusters that then formed a mother-daughter inheritance link with the canonical class. However, the type of inheritance links between the subclasses within each cluster and the canonical class varies. Wu also argued that construction grammar was powerful in explaining prominent problems associated with the BA construction, including the intransitive verbs that occur in BA sentences, the post-verbal objects, the causative BA sentences, and the instrumental BA sentences. He proposed that

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The BA Construction

the causative BA construction should be considered a causative construction that is only related to the BA construction in form. Whereas the instructional BA construction should be seen as an instructional construction that uses BA as a dialectal variant of yong (to use/with). Wu did not analyze the interaction between the BA construction and its components, namely, the subject NP, the BA NP, the verb phrase, and the preposition BA. Longlong Ge (2012) also analyzed the BA construction using the construction grammar framework. She defined the canonical meaning of the BA construction as “controlled causality,” which is an extension or rephrasing of the frequently used “disposal account.” By that she meant that the BA construction indicates that the change occurred to the BA object as a result of an action exerted by the subject (Ge 2012, 20). She also argued that the prototype schemata of the BA construction are the path and motion schemata, which involve an origin (departure point), a path, and a destination. This prototype schemata are mapped with the canonical BA sentence type in: Subject + BA N1 + V + 在(zai: at)/给(gei: to)/到(dao: to; towards)/向(xiang: towards, to) + N2.

All other pairings of BA sentences and their meanings develop from the prototype schemata through metaphorical connections as perceived through analogy (Ge 2012, 29). Ge also analyzed the interactions and dynamics between its components and viewed construction as a gestalt whose meaning is instantiated by its components (Ge 2012, 33). There are constraints on the components of the BA construction, but when the components do not satisfy these constraints, it is the construction that helps them fulfill the constraints. For example, the subject of the BA construction needs to have the ability to cause a motion. However, in the following sentence: 16) 那 个 电影 把 小李 吓 哭 Na ge dianying ba xiaoli xia ku That CLS movie BA little Li scare cry “That movie scared Xiao Li [and] make him cry”

了。 le ASP

The movie, which does not have the ability itself to cause a motion, acquires this ability from the BA construction via metaphorical connections and can thus be used as the subject of the BA sentence. To sum up, the construction grammar framework provides a new perspective from which to understand and analyze the BA construction, the evidence of which has shown to be an independent construction whose meaning cannot be interpreted as the combination of its components. One contribution

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Chapter 1

that the construction grammar perspective makes is that it claims that the BA construction is not derived from SVO sentences, which helps us to focus on the form of this construction and the semantic, pragmatic, and discourse meanings it denotes. TYPES OF BA SENTENCES Many studies that employed the construction grammar perspective based their analysis on instances of the target construction collected from a corpus. Although research on the BA construction from the usage-based construction grammar perspective has been more recent compared to other perspectives, there have been studies that focus on identifying different types of BA sentences based on the functions these sentences fulfill and the frequency rates of these sentences in natural language. As Cui (1995) pointed out, the verb phrase is the focus of sentences in Modern Chinese, including BA sentences, which conforms to the end-focus principle. He argues that, in different types of BA sentences, most elements (such as subject, BA object, etc.) remain the same, and the variation comes from the different forms that the verb phrases take. The main goals of these studies are mainly to pinpoint the core meanings of the BA construction and to provide guidance on the order in which the different types of BA sentences should be taught when teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Among these studies, a few of them have been widely cited, and their findings have also been incorporated into the Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education (hereafter, Standards), published in 2021. In the following section, these studies as well as the types of BA sentences listed in the Standards will be introduced. Corpus-Based Studies on the Types of BA Sentences Wenhua Lyu (1994) collected 1,094 sentences that used the BA construction from a corpus with 530,000 characters. These BA sentences were grouped into six categories based on the meaning and function that they realized, including displacement of the BA object, change or result imposed on the BA object, the interrelationship between the BA object and the state or action denoted in the verb phrase, and the causative relationship realized in the BA construction. Under each category, there are specific types of BA sentences. The frequency of these BA sentences in each category as well as the overall frequency of each category were calculated. The results show that almost half of the BA sentences (49.8%) were used to emphasize the results imposed on the BA object due to the action denoted

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The BA Construction

by the verb. Four types of sentences fall into this category, namely the verb phrase has a resultative complement (23.3%) a directional complement (19.9%), with a verb + de (得) + stative verb (adjective) (3.5%), or with an indirect object after the verb (3.1%) (Lyu 1994, 28). The following examples illustrate the types of BA sentences with a stative verb as a resultative complement or with an indirect object after the verb. 17) 妈妈 把 屋子 收拾 Mama ba wuzi shoushi Mom BA room sort out “Mom cleaned the house.” 18) 他 把 好消息 告诉 Ta ba haoxiaoxi gaosu He BA good news tell “He told everyone the good news.”

得 干干净净。 de ganganjingjing PART clean 了 le ASP

大家。 dajia everyone

Approximately one third (27.8%) of the BA sentences in this corpus were used to indicate the displacement of the BA object, including those with prepositional phrases after the verb to indicate location (在(zai: at) + noun), destination (到(dao: to) + noun), recipient (给(gei: to) + noun), and abstract destination (向/入(xiang/ru: towards/ into) + noun). Among these four types of sentences, the first two appeared with greater frequency (11.5% and 8.9%, respectively) than the latter two (5.0% and 2.3%, respectively) (Lyu 1994, 28). A third category identified by Lyu (1994) mainly denotes the meaning of quantified actions (verb + 了/一(le/yi: ASP/one) + verb; verb + measure word; 一(yi: one) + verb), the manner in which the actions are conducted (adverb + verb), or the state denoted by the verbs (verb + 着(zhe: ASP)). Although there are five types of BA sentences in this category, they overall accounted for 8.4% of the whole collection of BA sentences (Lyu 1994, 28). Another category listed in Lyu’s study, although showing a low frequency of usage (6.3%), includes BA sentences whose usage is obligatory, namely, sentences that use the verb + 成 (cheng: to become) or 作(zuo: to consider as) + noun. These sentences indicate either a change of state of the BA NP into the noun after the verb or the equivalence between the BA NP and the noun after the verb, as illustrated in the following example: 19) 他 先 把 番茄 切 成 块。 Ta xian ba fanqie qie cheng kuai He first BA tomato cut become piece “First, he cut the tomato into pieces.”

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Chapter 1

The fifth category, as defined by Lyu, denotes unpleasant or undesired meanings and accounts for 5.1% of the BA sentences in the database. The verb forms that these BA sentences take include verb + 了 le, and verb + other elements. For example, 20) 台风 把 广告牌 刮 Taifeng ba guanggaopai gua Typhoon BA billboard blow “The typhoon blew down the billboard.”

倒 dao collapse

了。 le ASP

Cui (1995) collected sentences that use the BA construction from two novels: Dream of the Red Chamber (only the first 80 chapters included), published in the Qing Dynasty, and Half of Man Is Woman, written by a contemporary Chinese writer, Zhang Xianliang. Cui found 1,265 and 361 BA sentences, respectively, in these two novels. He also reported the breakdowns of different types of BA sentences based on the frequency with which they appeared in his database, but he grouped them into two broad categories: BA sentences with a result in the predicate (VP = RVC or includes RVC) and BA sentences that take a non-RVC as VP. His findings closely resemble the distribution of BA sentences in Lyu’s database, although Lyu did not reveal the source of his database. Approximately half of the BA sentences (58.7% from Dream of the Red Chamber and 47.4% from Half of Man Is Woman) fall into the verb + resultative complement or verb + directional complement (Cui 1995, 15). Cui (1995) also found many BA sentences that indicate the displacement of the BA object, sentences in which the verbs are followed by a prepositional phrase (在(zai: at) /到 (dao: to) /给 (gei: to) /向 (xiang: towards)). In the modern novel Half of Man Is Woman, 42.1% of the BA sentences fall into this group, whereas in Dream of the Red Chamber, only 19.8% of the BA sentences are in this group (Cui 1995, 15). This difference indicates changes in the usage of the BA construction over those 250 years. These findings are supported by more recent studies reported in Zhang (2001). Zhang collected 2,160 BA sentences from the People’s Daily newspaper and found that more than half of them (51.9% of 1,121 sentences) indicated a physical or abstract displacement. He did not list the types of BA sentences, but from his sample sentences, it can be seen that these sentences took the verb + directional complement/prepositional phrase as their predicates. Similar to the findings from Lyu (1994), Cui also reported a small portion of the BA sentences that take a non-RVC as its VP: 13.7% from Dream of the Red Chamber and 12.6% from Half of Man Is Woman (Cui 1995, 15). These non-RVC predicates include quantifiers before or after the verb (一 (yi) verb or verb + quantifier), adverbs before a verb, or bare verbs used as idioms.

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Jing-Schmidt, Zhuo, and Chen, Jing-Yun (2015) collected BA sentences from a spoken language corpus and identified 17 subtypes of the BA construction, which they ranked by frequency. The top four subtypes, those that appear with the highest frequency, include the following (Jing-Schmit and Chen 2015, 12): Verb + locative complement to indicate displacement (20.9%) Verb + directional complement to indicate change of orientation in space (17.1%) Verb + resultative complement to indicate the change of state (16.6%) Verb + metamorphic complement to indicate change of appearance or identity (15.2%)

An example of the fourth type is as follows: 21) 他 把 它 变 成 一 Ta ba ta bian cheng yi He BA it chang become one “He changed it into a flower.”

朵 duo MW

花。 hua flower

Jing-Schmidt and Chen’s findings are similar to those from the earlier corpus-based studies that collected data from the written Chinese language. In general, the corpus-based studies that identified the most frequently used BA sentences or subtypes of the BA construction include the following types:

a) b) c) d)

BA + NP + V + PP (在 zai: at/到 dao: to/向 xiang: to/给 gei: towards) BA + NP + V + DC (Directional complement) BA + NP + V + RC (Resultative complement) BA + NP1 + V (成 cheng: to change into/作 zuo: to consider as) + NP2

Subtypes of the BA Construction Listed in National Guidelines In 2021, the Center for Language Education and Cooperation, located in China, published a revised, three-volume version of Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education. These guidelines provide descriptions of three proficiency levels with nine sublevels—beginning (sublevels 1–3), intermediate (sublevels 4–6), and advanced (sublevels 7–9)—and include linguistic aspects, language functions, and language skills. In its volume on grammar, it lists the following subtypes of the BA construction and ranks them in the order based on the proficiency levels and

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sublevels. The BA construction is not introduced until the late-beginning level (sublevel 3), starting with the subtypes that indicate “disposal.” Specifically, it lists the following subtypes for sublevels 3 and above: Sublevel 3: a) Subject + BA + Object + Verb + 在(zai: at) /到(dao: to) + Place b) Subject + BA + NP1 + Verb + 给(gei: to (a recipient)) + NP2 c) Subject + BA + NP + Verb + Resultative Complement/Directional Complement/State Complement Sublevel 4: d) Subject + BA + Object + Verb (一(yi: one) /了(le: ASP)) + Verb e) Subject + BA + Object (+给(gei: to emphasize the predicate) + Verb + 了(le: ASP) /着(zhe: ASP) f) Subject + BA + Object + Verb + Quantifying complement Sublevel 5: g) Subject + BA + Object + Adverbial + Verb h) Subject + BA + Object + 一(yi: one) + Verb i) Subject + BA + Object + Verb + 了 le j) Subject + BA + NP1 + Verb + NP2 Sublevel 6: k) Subject (inanimate) + BA + Object + Verb + Other element l) Subject + BA + Object (Agent) + Verb + Other element Sublevels 7–9 (combined): m) (Subject +) BA + Object (Agent) + Verb + 了(le: ASP) It can be noted that the list above overlaps well with the findings from the corpus-based studies and represents the ranking of frequency of subtype BA sentences: those BA sentences that denote displacement and results are introduced first, and those BA sentences that are far less frequently used and denote either quantified action or causality are introduced at the laterintermediate or advanced level. However, the pace at which these different subtypes should be introduced still needs to be determined. CHAPTER SUMMARY This chapter gives a summary of the BA construction. It starts with a review on the origin and development of the BA construction, followed by

The BA Construction

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a detailed discussion of the meaning of the BA construction and its different components by reviewing and commenting on proposals made by previous research. It also discusses the constraints imposed on the components of the BA construction to make it grammatical. It moves on to introduce a more recent perspective, construction grammar, on the understanding and analysis of the BA construction. It ends with a summary of the different types of BA sentences and their usage frequency based on findings from corpora based on different genres and modalities. NOTES 1. de is a particle that indicates that what follows is the result of the action. 2. Glossing added by the author. 3. la is a fusion of le and a to express interrogation. 4. zhe is an aspect particle to indicate the continuation of an action or a state.

Chapter 2

Acquisition of the BA Construction Among L2 Learners of Chinese

CHAPTER INTRODUCTION Compared with research on the linguistic properties of the BA construction, studies on the acquisition of the BA construction are few, and studies on the acquisition of the BA construction among L2 learners are even fewer despite an increasing population of L2 learners of Chinese. The increasing popularity in learning Chinese as a foreign language calls for more studies that explore its overall acquisition and within that the acquisition of the BA construction—an important construction in Chinese grammar. In addition to that, how to help L2 learners acquire the BA construction and use it appropriately has also been of great interest among instructors of Chinese. What instructional approaches and strategies have been proposed and how effective are they? This chapter discusses the findings from previous research on the acquisition of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the BA construction by L2 Chinese learners. It also discusses the previous research on different types of sentences using the BA construction. The goal of this chapter is to introduce the pertinent literature to help readers understand where the present studies conducted by this author fit in. ACQUISITION OF THE BA CONSTRUCTION In the United States, studies that explored the acquisition of the BA construction among learners of Chinese as a foreign language did not emerge until the 1990s. As far as this author could find, the first study of this kind was conducted by Honggang Jin (1992). Jin investigated the acquisition order of different types of BA sentences from a pragmaticization perspective. Shenglan 45

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Zhang (2002) examined the development of acquiring specific BA properties among L2 Chinese learners. Hang Du (2004) investigated the comprehension and production of specific constraints on the BA construction among learners of Chinese. Jing Zheng (2017) searched published articles on BA acquisition from CNKI, a database with a comprehensive collection of academic journals in China, and found that 39 articles had been published between 1993 and 2016, with a majority of them (61.5%) published after 2010 (Zheng 2017, 21). After a somewhat exhaustive search for journal articles published both in China and overseas, it was found that a large number of studies examined learners’ acquisition of the BA construction, especially the acquisition order of different types of BA sentences, by analyzing the errors in the different types of BA sentences from corpora at different scales. Only a limited number of studies designed experiments to elicit data on learners’ production, comprehension, and awareness of the linguistic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the BA construction. In the following sections, findings from previous studies will be introduced, and implications from these studies will also be discussed, so that a better understanding of the settings of the studies this author has conducted can be gained. The Acquisition Order of Different Types of BA Sentences Most studies in this area first decided on the types of BA sentences they attempted to explore, which were based on the meanings and functions that these sentence types realize (for more detail, see chapter 1). The number of types of BA sentences varies greatly, from two to three big categories (Wan and Guo 2013; Wang 2004a and 2004b; Xie 2003) to 5–10 of the most frequently used types (Cheng 2006; Wei 2006; Xiong 1996; You 2016; Yu 2000; Zhang 2009), to a more comprehensive exploration of over 10 specific types of BA sentences (Gao 1999; Huang and Xiao 2012; Jin 2014; Lin 2001; Lyu 2008). The researchers collected data either from a corpus or from participants’ responses to experimental tasks and used it to analyze the accuracy rates and error patterns so that they were able to propose an acquisition order based on accuracy rates: the higher the accuracy rate of a certain type of BA sentence, the earlier that type comes in the acquisition order and the more easily it is acquired. Corpus-based studies mainly collected data from large national corpora, including the HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi: Chinese Proficiency Exam) corpus of written texts (Wan and Guo 2013; Xu and Cui 2012; You 2016; Zhang 2010), the Jinan Chinese Learner Corpus (Huang and Xiao 2012; Wan and Guo 2013; Xiong 1996), HSK tests results (Jiang 1999), or self-collected naturally produced data (Jin 2014; Li 1996; Zhang 2009). Other than a few exceptions (Xu and Cui 2012), most of the corpus-based studies did not

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specify the native languages of the L2 Chinese learners nor their proficiency levels. Other studies designed comprehension and production tasks to elicit data on different types of BA sentences, including grammaticality judgement tasks with or without error-correction (Cheng 2006; Wei 2006), online comprehension tasks (Wang 2004a), multiple choice questions (Cheng 2006; Lin 2001; Lyu 2008), judgement-based sentence transformations (Wei Hong 2006), sentence completion (Cheng 2006; Yu 2000), sentence translation in contexts (Lin 2001; Lyu 2008), sentence creation with or without samples (Wang 2004b; Wei 2006), and picture description (Xie 2003; Zhang 2009). Many studies only examined the production of BA sentences. A few examined both the comprehension and production of BA sentences. It is a pity that most studies neither included the tasks they used in their articles nor gave even an example of what their tasks looked like. It is thus unclear what knowledge their studies tapped in their tasks, especially in tasks such as multiple choice questions or grammaticality judgment exercises. From the few studies that did attach the tasks they used, the multiple-choice questions provided possible options of a certain type of BA sentence, with possible errors as distracting options. Another issue is that almost all the studies included only one question or token per task to represent each type of BA sentence, an approach that may have impacted both the validity and reliability of these tasks in collecting accurate data, a fact that some researchers have pointed out in their own articles (Xie 2003, for instance). The acquisition order has been examined through the eliciting of data either from the comprehension or production of the BA construction or both. Whereas the corpus-based studies mentioned earlier only examined production data (except Jiang 1999), some experimental studies investigated both comprehension and production. Studies have found that, though the acquisition order of these two modalities is different (Cheng 2006; Lyu 2008), since they are both positively correlated (Lyu 2008), they were combined in these studies. It is hard to generalize an acquisition order of different types of BA sentences from the existing literature. The types of BA sentences examined vary greatly, as do the findings on acquisition order. Therefore, in the following section, only some commonalities in their findings, along with the acquisition of some frequently used BA sentence types, will be discussed. Refer to chapter 1 for a more detailed account of the meaning, format, and example sentences of the types of BA sentences discussed below. Despite the variation in the acquisition order identified in previous studies, one finding is consistent across them all: BA sentences that indicate displacement of an item and take the form of 把 (ba: BA) + NP1 + Verb + 在 (zai: at)/到(dao: to)/给(gei: to) + NP2 are either the first or the second type to be acquired (Cheng 2006; Gao 1999; Huang and Xiao 2012; Jin

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2014; Lin 2001; Lyu 2008; Xie 2003; Yu 2000; Zhang 2009). This type of BA sentence has a strong sense of disposal and its use is obligatory, and it is also introduced early in textbooks, at the same time that the BA construction is first introduced and frequently practiced (Zhang 2009). However, an interesting finding from Cheng (2006) is that, although 78% of the participants were able to choose the correct BA sentences, and 78% were able to create a BA sentence of this type, only 7% of the participants showed any awareness of ungrammatical BA sentences involving this type (Cheng 2006, 43). This finding may indicate that participants learned this type as a chunk, with little awareness of its obligatory usage or the ungrammatical counterpart in the SVO order: verb + NP1 + 在 (zai: at)/到(dao: to)/给 (gei: to) + NP2. There is no consensus on which type of BA sentence is the most difficult to acquire. Multiple studies have found that several types of BA sentences are acquired at a later stage, including the following: BA + NP1 + Verb + Complement of Frequency (Huang and Xiao 2012; Jin 2014) BA + NP1 + Adverb + Verb (Gao 1999; Lin 2001; Lyu 2008) BA + NP1 + Verb + NP2 (Cheng 2006; Yu 2000; Zhang 2008

L1 corpus studies reveal that another frequently used type of BA sentence is the one that emphasizes the results on the BA NP or its change of state as a result of an action initiated by the subject: BA + NP + Verb + Resultative Complement (Verb or Adjective). Learners’ performance on this type of BA sentence differed greatly across previous studies. Some studies found that this type of BA sentence was among the last acquired (Gao 1999; Jin 2014; Zhang 2009), while some found this type to be situated in the beginning or middle of the acquisition order (Cheng 2006; Huang and Xiao 2012; Lin 2001; Lyu 2008). Many studies distinguished the verb-as-resultative-complement from the adjective-as-resultative-complement and found some differences in participants’ performances. Some studies found that adjectives as resultative complements were easier to acquire (Lyu 2008; Zhang 2014), but others found the opposite (Huang and Xiao 2012; Lin 2001), and still others found no difference (Cheng 2006). The type of BA sentence in which the verb takes a simple or complex directional complement to indicate the motion or movement of the action has also been examined in most acquisition order studies. Many studies found that this type of BA sentence was neither the earliest nor the latest to be acquired. Compared with the acquisition of BA sentences that indicate results, this type of BA sentence was found to be harder to acquire, especially if it incorporated a complex directional complement (Cheng 2006; Huang and Xiao 2012; Jin 2014; Lin 2001). However, other studies found that the BA sentences taking a directional complement were easier

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to acquire than those with a resultative complement (Gao 1999; Lyu 2008; Zhang 2009). There are some possible explanations for these disparate findings, including the variety of native languages, target language proficiency levels, learning environment, exposure to different types of BA sentences, and the design of the tasks. Participants’ native languages included English, Japanese, Korean, Kazakh, Vietnamese, Thai, and Uyghur. Most corpus-based studies did not include native language as a factor in their analysis of the written data. Participants in most experimental studies spoke one particular native language. The few experimental studies that included learners’ languages as a factor did find differences in learners’ comprehension or awareness of the use of BA sentences (Wang 2004a and 2004b; Yu 2000). As for proficiency levels, there was also a wide spectrum, from beginner (Cheng 2006; Wang 2004a and 2004b; Wei 2006) to intermediate (Jin 2014; Lyu 2008; Yu 2000; Zhang 2009), to advanced (Jiang 2018; Xu and Cui 2012), to superior (Lin 2001). It is hard to compare the acquisition order among learners of different proficiency levels because acquisition is a dynamic process. What each study has found provides us with a snapshot of the process among a particular group of learners. Error Patterns in BA Sentences Among Learners of Chinese Because the studies that explored the acquisition order of different types of BA sentences based their findings on accuracy rates or error rates of learners’ performance on these sentences, either in their written essays or in their responses to different tasks, they always included a discussion of error patterns identified from the collected data. In addition, there are studies that mainly focused on the error patterns (Jiang 1999; Li 1996; Liu 2003; Xu and Cui 2012; Wei 2006; Yang 2012; You 2016; Zhang 2010). Although different studies had different focuses, a few common error patterns were identified. One of the most frequently found error patterns is missing elements, especially the omission of a complement after the verb (Cheng 2006; Huang and Xiao 2012; Jin 2014; Li 1996; Lin 2001; Liu 2003; Wei 2006; Xie 2003; Zhang 2009). Studies that identified missing verbs reported that learners used the resultative complement but failed to use a main verb (Cheng 2006; Lin 2001; Liu 2003; Xie 2003; Yang 2012; Zhang 2009). Some researchers identified this error as a misuse of intransitive or stative verbs in BA sentences (Li 1996; Wei 2006). For example: 1) *

他 把 那 个 Ta ba na ge He BA that CL “He broke that cup.”

杯子 beizi cup

碎 了。 sui le broken ASP

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In Sentence 1), the word sui is an intransitive verb and functions as a complement, but the main verb is missing, which can be 打 (da: to hit). Another error pattern that has been identified by multiple studies is word order, especially the position of negatives, auxiliary verbs, and adverbials of time, which, unlike their positions in SVO sentences, are not placed right before the verb phrase, but, rather, before the BA phrase (Cheng 2006; Jiang 1999; Li 1996; Lin 2001; Wei 2006; Yang 2012; Zhang 2009). An example of this error is as follows: 2) *

你 把 车 不要 停 Ni ba che buyao ting You BA car no want park “Don’t park your car here.”

在 zai at

这儿。 zhe’r here

In Sentence 2), the negation phrase 不要buyao should be placed before the BA NP phrase rather than following the BA NP, 把车ba che in this case. Jiang (1999) found that this type of error was consistent among learners across proficiency levels. Even learners at a higher proficiency level were not aware that the negation words should be placed before the BA NP (Jiang 1999, 51). Although learners at lower levels did show word-order errors in which they chose to place verb phrases before the BA NP (Jiang 1999, 51), other errors on word order were rare (Haung and Xiao 2012; Jin 2014). In addition to the above frequently reported error patterns, errors of misused verbs and complements, including using the complement to describe the state of the subject not the BA object, and errors of the omission or misplacement of BA were also found. The errors identified above came from cases in which the BA sentence should be used and the BA sentence was actually used by the learners. The question remains, however, whether or not learners truly know when a BA sentence should be used or would be preferred. Is their awareness of the use of the BA construction as well developed as that of native speakers of Chinese? Many studies have found that learners failed to use the BA as frequently as the native speakers. This is known as the avoidance of BA usage (Cheng 2006; Lin 2001; Li 1996; Xiong 1996; Yang 2012; You 2016; Zhang 2010; Zhang 2009). Wenxin Xiong (1996) compared the use of BA sentences from a corpus of written language produced by L2 Chinese learners and the BA sentences in Chinese textbooks. He found that learners all showed avoidance of BA usage regardless of proficiency level or native language (Xiong 1996, 83). The frequency of BA sentences in the textbooks was 2.27‰, whereas the frequency

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in the L2 Chinese learner corpus was 0.93‰ (Xiong 1996, 81). Yue You (2016) collected data from the HSK corpus and grouped the errors into three categories: avoidance, overgeneralized use, and other errors. She found that 48.8% of the errors were due to avoidance. She also found that learners avoided using certain types of BA sentences more than others, particularly those BA sentences whose use is obligatory. Among all the avoidance cases, 52.5% were deployed in order to avoid two of the most frequently used BA sentences: Subject + BA+ N1 + Verb + 在(zai: at) /到(dao: to) /给(gei: to) /向(xiang: towards) + N2, and Subject + BA + N1 + Verb + 成(cheng: to become) /作(zuo: as) + N2 (You 2016, 60). Among Japanese-speaking learners of Chinese at the advanced level, Xu and Cui (2012) found a similar avoidance pattern connected with the first type of the BA sentence cited above. This is considered evidence of fossilization with high gravity (Xu and Cui 2012, 114). However, some scholars claimed that the error of avoidance had been overemphasized and did not reflect a true picture of learners’ acquisition (Liu 2003; Liu and Wang 2003; Zhang 2010). Liu and Wang (2003) examined L2 learners’ awareness and accuracy in producing BA sentences in contexts adapted from textbook exercises, with native speakers as a baseline. They found that the use of the BA construction in these contexts was not significantly different from that of native speakers. Both groups showed a low usage of BA. Out of the 16 contexts, only two contexts elicited a highly consistent use of BA among native speakers. Eleven contexts failed to elicit over 50% of responses in BA sentences (Liu and Wang 2003, 61). The real difference between the L2 and native groups might be greater if more BA-preferred contexts were used. In other words, these more BA-neutral contexts may have obscured learners’ avoidance of BA. Songhao Liu (2003) discussed the concept of avoidance and argued that avoidance was a conscious decision made by learners even when the context allowed for it, and they knew how to use it. In other words, not using the BA construction might be a personal choice, or communicative strategy, rather than an error (Liu 2003, 65). Moreover, whether a certain context calls for the BA construction or not should not be decided by the researcher (Liu 2003, 65) because this could just be the researcher’s personal preference. Based on the findings from Liu and Wang (2003), Liu (2003) argued that the difficulty in using the BA construction, including avoidance, had been overstated. Zhang (2010) collected data from the HSK written-text corpus and found that accuracy in BA sentence use was high (87.48%). He then grouped the errors into the categories of avoidance, overuse, and other errors and found a roughly equal distribution of these errors: 35.79%, 34.92%, and 29.28%, respectively (Zhang 2010, 271). In theory, he echoed Liu’s (2003) view on avoidance as an active and conscious choice and thus argued that what had

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been identified among L2 learners was omission that learners were not aware of. Instead, he emphasized the overuse of the BA construction, which he argued may be caused by instructors’ overstatement of the high frequency of the BA construction use and the low frequency of use among learners of Chinese (Zhang 2010, 270). Zhang (2010) pointed out the important issue of the tendency to overuse the BA construction among L2 Chinese learners, but his conclusion that avoidance (or omission, by his definition) is not a big issue may not be convincing based on the way the data was collected in his study. The error analysis was based on the sentences from the HSK written-text corpus that contain “把ba,” which material may have overlooked cases in which native speakers of Chinese might have used the BA construction and L2 learners did not. Xu and Cui (2012) also expressed a similar concern that the scope of avoidance may have not been accurately measured in using a written text corpus because the cases in which acceptable non-BA sentences were produced but a BA sentence was actually preferable were ignored and not counted as cases of avoidance. A more recent study, using the same data although on a smaller scale, obtained different results by employing the same research method (You 2016). Cheng (2006) found that Japanese learners of Chinese at the beginning level showed more avoidance in producing BA sentences than in choosing sentences from given options, which indicates that learners are aware that they should use the BA construction, but they intentionally avoid using it in their production for various reasons. Another issue that has been consistently identified by previous studies is the overuse of the BA construction (Cheng 2006; Li 1996; Lin 2001; Wei 2006; Xu and Cui 2012; Yang 2012; You 2016; Zhang 2010; Zhang 2009). The cases in which the BA construction should not be used but was used include the following: 1) those in which the predicates involved intransitive verbs, stative verbs, sensational verbs, possessive verbs, or verbs with potential complements; 2) those in which the BA NP was indefinite; 3) those in which the prepositional 把ba was used where a different preposition should have been used. In the above overuse cases, sentences with SVO structure, topic-comment structure, or pivotal structure should have been used rather than sentences with the BA construction. Avoidance and overuse are actually two sides of the same coin: lack of understanding of the function of the BA construction and the linguistic constraints which BA sentences must satisfy. If learners do not understand the function of the BA construction well, they are likely to either overgeneralize

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it and use it in cases where it should not be used, intentionally avoid using it, or even be unaware of the need for the BA construction at all. Before effective instructional strategies can be adopted, it is necessary to get some information on learners’ awareness and knowledge on the function of and linguistic constraints governing the BA construction. In the following section, a review of previous research on these aspects will be made. The Acquisition of the Syntactic Properties of the BA Construction The earliest studies along this line date back to the 1990s. Over the ensuing years, the acquisition of some syntactic constraints on the BA construction have been explored, including the verb complex constraint and the word order constraint. Honggang Jin (1992) presented the acquisition of the BA construction by English-speaking learners of Chinese as one of the ways to explore the process of typological interaction between subject-prominent languages (e.g., English) and topic-prominent languages (e.g., Chinese). She used a grammaticality judgment task, a translation task, and a picture-elicited story-telling task to examine whether L2 Chinese learners undergo a “pragmaticization” process in their acquisition and whether any phases can be identified during this process. The target BA sentences employed three variables: the definiteness of the BA NP, the disposability of the VP, and the syntactic roles of the BA NP. She identified three clustered BA sentences based on participants’ performance. Participants, regardless of their Chinese proficiency levels, did well on the Cluster I BA sentences in which the BA NP is the object of the VP, the VP is strongly disposable, and the context for using the BA construction is clearest. However, participants’ performance correlated more with their proficiency levels when it came to Cluster II BA sentences in which the BA NP plays a different role than the object, the VP is not strongly disposable, and the context is subtler. When it came to Cluster III BA sentences, all participants, regardless of their proficiency levels, registered poor performances. Though this study showed the developmental stages in L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of the BA construction, because every BA sentence used incorporated all the noted features, it is impossible to tease apart which features are acquired before others. In addition, in the translation task, participants were explicitly told to use the BA construction, which prevented the gleaning of any information on participants’ awareness of when to use it. Shenglan Zhang (2002) explored the developmental process by adult L2 Chinese learners at three proficiency levels in the acquisition of six properties of the BA construction, including word order, verbs allowed in the BA construction, resultative complements, directional complements, the aspect

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marker le, and the reduplication of the verb. A grammaticality task, a translation task, and a picture-cue production task were used to measure L2 learners’ interlanguage knowledge of these properties. The findings showed that participants did the best with word order, followed by the aspect marker le, and then verb selection. They registered lower scores on directional complements, verb reduplication, and resultative complements. Zhang also claimed to have identified a U-shaped developmental pattern connected with each property or all properties combined, one that is based on participants’ proficiency levels. This study made a good attempt to explore L2 learners’ acquisition of some specific properties of the BA construction; however, the properties chosen for this study did not follow any criteria. Moreover, the U-shaped development theory claims that the seemingly backward deviation in the process is actually an indication of rule internalization and overgeneralization. There is no evidence indicating that the failure of the performance among the participants with higher proficiency levels is due to overgeneralization or internalization. Hang Du (2004) explores L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of the BA NP constraint (the BA NP must be specific) and the VP constraint (the VP in the BA construction must be complex) by measuring students’ comprehension and production of BA sentences. A grammaticality judgment task and a video-cued production task were used to collect data. The findings show that L2 learners’ judgment on the grammaticality of BA sentences was not significantly different from that of native speakers. However, although these learners were able to use a complement to satisfy the VP constraint when they produced a BA sentence, they produced fewer BA sentences than native speakers. Another interesting discovery from this study was that L2 learners found it more difficult to reject an ungrammatical BA sentence than to accept a grammatical one. The Acquisition of the Semantic Properties of the BA Construction There are fewer studies that explore the acquisition of the semantic properties of the BA construction than those that explore the syntactic properties. In the semantic studies, a particular meaning was singled out, and then a subgroup of BA sentences in which this semantic meaning was realized was used to explore learners’ acquisition. Wenxin Xiong (1996) explored how L2 Chinese learners acquire the semantic meaning of “change” in BA sentences that are realized in four subtypes: change of location, change of ownership, change of state, and change of properties. His study analyzed learners’ written texts from the Jinan Chinese Interlanguage Corpus and compared the distribution of these subtypes with the distribution of the same subtypes in two sets of Chinese textbooks,

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five volumes in total. He discovered that the distributions in these two databases were significantly different. The order of use frequency in the two sets of textbooks was similar: change of properties (57.5%) > change of location (25.6%) > change of ownership (11.4%) > change of state (5.4%). However, the corpus database showed a different order: change of ownership (36.3%) > change of properties (15.8%) >change of location (14.85%) > change of state (8.8%) (Xiong 1996, 81–82). His argument, then, is that L2 learners have their own “built-in syllabus,” regardless of the input they are exposed to. He further explored the factors that could possibly contribute to learners’ developmental patterns and found that both learners’ native language and their proficiency levels played a role. Learners whose L1 was Korean or Japanese used more BA sentences than learners whose L1 was English. Xiong attributed this difference to typology differences among Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean. English is a subject-oriented language, whereas Chinese is a topic-oriented language. Japanese and Korean are both topic and subject languages. He thus claimed that this typological difference imposes more difficulties on L1 English learners than on L1 Japanese or L1 Korean learners (Xiong 1996, 83). His argument echoes the argument made in Jin (1992). However, when it comes to accuracy of usage, L1 English learners showed an advantage, which, as Xiong argued, might be the result of a pre-screening process done by the learners, including avoidance, before they actually decided to use the BA construction. Wenqing Yu (2000) explored the acquisition of similar semantic properties of the BA construction: change of place, state, and other features. Participants were learners with different L1s: English, Japanese, and Korean. Participants were asked to fill in some blanks based on role-plays they had watched. They were asked to revise what they had written after they were asked to consider if the BA construction should be used. The results showed that, regardless of their L1s, all participants did better with BA sentences that indicated change of place than they did with sentences that reflected other semantic meanings. However, the types of BA sentences that learners tried to avoid varied among the groups depending on the learners’ L1. L1 English learners avoided using BA sentences to denote change of state, while both L1 Korean and L1 Japanese learners only avoided using BA sentences to denote change of place when both direct object and indirect object were present. Xiaohong Wen (2010) examined the acquisition of a subset of the BA construction, namely, those BA sentences that indicate the displacement of the BA NP as a result of the VP by L2 Chinese learners at different proficiency levels. The results indicate that both the frequency and accuracy of BA construction usage increases as proficiency levels improve. Explicit task instructions elicited greater use of the BA construction. Though Wen brought a new perspective to the acquisition of the BA construction, it is

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a pity that, in this study, only four BA sentences were used in the implicit task, and only one BA sentence was included in the explicit task. The results would be more informative if more tokens had been used in each task to elicit “spatial displacement” BA sentences, ideally, using different locative particles in addition to 在zai. Yueyuan Huang and Suying Yang (2004) explored learners’ acquisition of one of the semantic properties of verbs in the BA construction: the telicity. The participants in their study were English-speaking learners who had reached the intermediate proficiency level. Data were elicited from three tasks that involved both production (sentence making and sentence transformation) tasks and a grammaticality judgement tasks, all of which included verbs with different lexical aspects: states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements. They found that participants not only rejected ungrammatical BA sentences that used stative verbs, but they also added complements or le to help activity verbs achieve telicity. The researchers thus argued that learners’ acquisition of the semantic property of the verbs in the BA construction conformed to findings from studies on acquisition of tense and lexical aspects of verbs proposed by the Aspect Hypothesis (Huang and Yang 2004, 56). Youshun Jiang (2018) examined learners’ knowledge of the semantic properties of verbs that can be used in the BA construction: transitivity and telicity. His participants were advanced level learners of Chinese whose native languages were Thai and Kazakh. He used an acceptability judgment task to elicit responses from both the L2 Chinese learners and native speakers of Chinese. Participants were asked to indicate their acceptance of a given sentence on a 1–6 scale. Responses from native speakers indicated that verbs which can be used in BA sentences are almost all (98.11%) both transitive and telic (Jiang 2018, 133). However, not all verbs that are both transitive and telic can be used in the BA construction. He found that learners, regardless of their L1s, acquired these two semantic properties in a similar order. They showed native-like acceptance when the verbs were both transitive and telic. However, the L2 Chinese groups showed a significantly higher acceptance than native speakers of BA sentences whose verbs were only one or the other, transitive or telic. However, when the verbs in the BA sentences were neither transitive nor telic, the L1 Thai learners’ acceptance was not significantly different from that of native speakers, while L1 Kazakh learners showed significantly higher acceptance than native speakers, although their acceptance rate was not significantly higher than that of the L1 Thai learners. Jiang thus argued that L1 plays a role to some extent in the acquisition of the semantic properties of the verbs (Jiang 2018, 138). Jiang’s study helps us identify the types of verbs that lead L2 learners to accept an ungrammatical BA sentence. Risheng Wan and Lihui Guo (2013) did a corpus-based error-analysis study to examine learners’ acquisition of form-meaning mappings of the BA

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construction from the construction grammar perspective. They put the BA sentences into three form-meaning mappings: displacement, disposal, and causality. They argued that each mapping involves the connection between semantic and linguistic units. Errors will occur if these connections are violated. Although they did not report the error rates in these mappings, they did provide some examples from the HSK written-text corpus, and they explained what had caused these errors. The Acquisition of the Pragmatic Properties of the BA Construction A limited number of studies investigate the acquisition of the pragmatic properties of the BA construction. Jin (1992) claims that the BA NP is a topic, and the more topicality the BA NP embodies, the more likely that a BA sentence will be used. However, it is a pity that the topicality of the BA NP as a factor was not manipulated in the tasks she assigned, and thus little can be concluded about L2 learners’ knowledge of the pragmatic property of the BA NP. Zhang (2002) used a translation task to examine L2 Chinese learners’ awareness of how to use the BA construction. Participants were asked to decide if the BA construction should be used in the translation of certain English sentences. Unfortunately, the translation task involved individual sentences without context, so what ended up being tested was essentially students’ awareness of obligatory BA sentences. Xie (2003) examined learners’ awareness of when to use BA and the quality of BA sentences produced by using a picture-description task. The focus of his study was one information point in the description, which was expressed overwhelmingly in the BA construction by native speakers. The results showed that learners, regardless of their proficiency levels, used the BA construction less frequently and with lower accuracy (pp. 10–11). This study elicited natural responses from learners, but unfortunately only included one information point on the BA construction. Liu and Wang (2003) examined learners’ pragmatic knowledge on when to use the BA construction. They described 16 different situations to the participants and asked them to give a response in Chinese to each situation. Later on, the participants were explicitly instructed to use the BA construction in the same 16 situations. They found that both L2 Chinese learners and native speakers of Chinese produced BA sentences at an equally low frequency (around 30%) despite the fact that all situations were designed by textbook editors to elicit BA sentences (Liu and Wang 2003, 61). However, the L2 Chinese learners’ production of BA sentences was less accurate than that of the native speakers. They thus claimed that learners’ awareness about when to use the BA construction was not the main issue; the main issue turned

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out to be their knowledge of what makes a grammatical BA sentence. Their study made a strong and successful argument about the designs of the exercises found in popular Chinese textbooks. Unfortunately, this study did not include enough situations in which BA sentences would be used naturally by native speakers, which may have blurred the picture on learners’ awareness of contexts that call for a BA sentence. A few studies reviewed in the previous sections did ask students to first indicate if the BA construction could be used in some tasks, such as sentence transformation (Wei 2006; Yu 2000). It is a pity that neither Wei (2006) nor Yu (2000) reported the participants’ awareness of when to use BA and when not to use BA when they were asked to decide it on their own. Liu (2003) elicited both naturally produced responses to certain scenarios and required BA sentences as responses to the same scenarios. A comparison was made between learners’ performances and that of native speakers in the former situation and no significant difference was found. However, as discussed in the previous section, given the fact that native speakers only used BA sentences consistently in less than half of the given scenarios, the task may not have accurately measured learners’ knowledge on the pragmatic property of the BA construction. Songhao Liu, Xuqing Qian, and Yan Wang (2002) used a picture-description task to elicit natural language production. For one piece of information in the picture description, 93% of the native speakers used the BA construction, while only 7% of the L2 learners used it, regardless of their proficiency levels (Liu, Qian, and Wang 2002, 96). This finding greatly contradicts the findings in Liu and Wang (2003), and this difference indicates that the scenarios in the tasks really play an important role and may tilt the results in one direction or another. Among the limited studies that explore the pragmatic knowledge of the BA construction among L2 learners, most only tested students’ awareness of when to use it and failed either to define the specific pragmatic properties or to include situations in which the BA construction was not preferred or should not be used. Factors That Affect the Acquisition of the BA Construction Of the studies that were reviewed in the previous sections, most discussed factors that may have contributed to the acquisition order, error patterns, or acquisition of specific linguistic properties of the BA construction. A few of the most frequently studied factors are discussed below. The first factor is learners’ native language. Most studies discussed the impact of L1 transfer; however, no consensus has been reached on the extent to which learners’ L1 affects acquisition. Some studies found that L1 exerted only a partial impact on the acquisition of the BA construction (Jiang

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2018; Yu 2000). Yu (2000) found that learners with L1 English, Korean, or Japanese showed better use of BA sentences with a strong notion of disposal than speakers of other languages while also showing a minimal use of BA sentences with double objects. However, learners with different L1s showed different patterns in their avoidance of other types of BA sentences. Even when they showed avoidance on the same type of BA sentences, the strategies adopted by learners with different native languages differed. Similarly, Jiang (2018) found that learners with different L1s (Thai and Kazakh) showed similar awareness of the semantic properties of verbs that can be used in BA sentences. Nevertheless, L1 had an impact on the way learners assessed the semantic features of those verbs. Other studies found that L1 had a stronger impact (Xiong 1996; Wang 2004a and 2004b). Xiong (1996) found that learners whose native languages are subject-oriented (e.g., English, German, Spanish, and Russian) showed more avoidance of the BA construction than learners whose native languages are topic-oriented (e.g., Japanese, and Korean), although their accuracy rates were higher when the BA construction was used (Xiong 1996, 84). Wang Yongde (2004a and 2004b) worked with beginning-level learners to explore the comprehension, processing, and production of two major categories of BA sentences: the BA object as the recipient of the action (Type 1) and the BA object as the agent of the action (Type 2). He found that L1 English learners of Chinese showed lower accuracy rates in their comprehension of BA sentences than L1 Korean and Japanese learners. Moreover, the L1 English group showed significantly longer response times than the Korean and Japanese groups. He also found a significant difference between the L1 English group and the L1 Japanese and L1 Korean groups in producing Type 2 BA sentences (Wang 2004b, 276). Another factor that has been included as a variable is proficiency level, but, as with L1, there is no consensus on the impact from proficiency levels. Some found no or limited impact on the acquisition of BA (Jiang 1999; Liu, Qian, and Wang 2002; Lyu 2008; Xie 2003). Some found a linear relationship between acquisition and proficiency level (Lin 2001; Wen 2010; Xiong 1996). Wen (2010) and Xiong (1996) found that both the frequency and accuracy in using the disposal BA sentences increased as learners’ proficiency levels increased. Xiong (1996) also found that the variety of BA sentences learners deploy improves as learners’ proficiency improves (Xiong 1996, 85). Lin (2001) states that beginning level learners have very limited knowledge about the function and meaning of the BA construction, but their awareness improves at the intermediate level stage when they begin to experiment with using more BA sentences despite making errors in choosing the right pre- or post-verbal components, while at the advanced level, learners’ errors clustered around certain complements (Lin 2001, 28). Other studies found that a

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mixture of factors impacted the acquisition of BA (Jin 1992; Zhang 2002). Zhang (2002) found a U-shaped developmental pattern in learners’ acquisition of certain linguistic properties of the BA construction as a result of learners’ proficiency levels. Jin (1992) found an interaction between proficiency level and types of BA sentences. There are certain types of BA sentences that learners either all did well on or all did poorly on, regardless of proficiency level. However, there is also a group of BA sentences whose correct use correlates strongly with proficiency level: the higher the level, the better the performance. A third factor that some studies have discussed are the modalities: comprehension, production, and awareness (Cheng 2006; Du 2004; Lin 2001; Lyu 2008; Yu 2000). Lyu (2008) found that the acquisition order of different types of BA sentences obtained from the comprehension task was different from that obtained from the production task, although they were positively correlated (Lyu 2008, 163). Overall, learners’ comprehension of BA sentences outperformed their production (Lyu 2008, 162). Lyu’s findings echo what Cheng (2006) found in his study, which also examines learners’ awareness of ungrammatical BA sentences and efforts to fix them and whose results indicated that, in most cases, learners failed to identify and fix ungrammatical BA sentences (Cheng 2006, 43). Du (2004) reported that L2 learners showed native-like performance in their awareness of the linguistic constraints on BA NP and VP sentences; however, they produced fewer BA sentences than native speakers.

CHAPTER SUMMARY This chapter reviews existing literature on the acquisition of the BA construction by L2 learners of Chinese, including the acquisition order of different types of BA sentences, error patterns in produced BA sentences, acquisition of specific syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the BA construction, and factors that impact the acquisition. These studies varied in many aspects, including learners’ L1s, proficiency levels, learning environment, data collection methods, and so on. Compared with research on the linguistic properties of the BA construction, studies on the acquisition of the BA construction are much fewer and more recent, beginning in the early 1990s in the United States and spreading out from there. Most of the studies reviewed in this chapter were conducted by scholars in China teaching L2 learners in China, and they either focused on different properties of the BA construction, including word order, the complex verb, and the BA NP, or they explored some subtypes of BA sentences based on their semantic meaning. These studies used different tasks, including

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grammaticality judgment, translation, picture/story-cued writing, and so on, to collect data on learners’ comprehension, awareness, and production of the BA construction. Consensus was rarely reached. Similarly, in terms of the acquisition of specific linguistic properties, other than regarding features such as the unique word order, the required complement after the verb, and so on, no consensus has been reached on other properties of the BA construction either. Most studies collected data from written-text corpuses and their analyses are mostly descriptive in nature. For those studies that collected their data from designed tasks, the tokens used for each type were minimal in number, a factor that may have weakened the reliability of the results. Most studies did not report the validity of the tokens in the tasks either. With the exception of the study done by Huang and Yang (2004), these studies also fail to use any theoretical framework from the second language acquisition field. This omission makes it hard to fit these acquisition studies into SLA research literature and difficult to gauge how they contribute to the field. The study conducted by this writer (as reported in chapter 4) attempted to fill in some of the gaps identified in this review.

Chapter 3

Teaching the BA Construction in Chinese as a Foreign Language

CHAPTER INTRODUCTION In the previous chapter, the existing literature on the acquisition of the BA construction was discussed. This chapter gives a review of the previous studies on how to teach the BA construction. Compared with linguistic studies and acquisition studies on the BA construction, the number of studies solely devoted to its instruction is limited. Instead, the instruction issue is usually discussed in the suggestions and implications section of those studies. For that reason, some studies discussed in chapter 2 will be reviewed in this chapter, and gaps in the research will be identified. INPUT AND PRACTICE FROM TEXTBOOKS Most adult learners of Chinese study it in a classroom setting with the help of a textbook. Textbooks and their supplementary workbooks are, therefore, extremely important for L2 learners, especially those who do not have much exposure to the language outside of the classroom. Textbooks provide primary input, but is this type of input effective? Does this type of input reflect the most recent findings and theories from linguistic studies and acquisition studies, particularly on the BA construction? All previous research on the instruction of the highly complex BA construction seems to agree that the teaching of it has been ineffective. Learners do not know why BA should be used, when it should be used, or how it should be used. As a result, advanced learners overuse the BA construction while lower-level learners avoid it (Liu, Qian, and Wang 2002; Liu and Wang 2003; Xiong 1996; Yu 2000). Some scholars view ineffectiveness of 63

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instruction as being related to the way textbooks introduce the BA construction (Jing-Schmidt and Peng 2015; Lin 2004; Shi 2012; Sun 2010; Xiong 1996; Yang 2012; Yu 2000; Zeng 2014; Zhang 2010). One issue that has been identified is that the textbooks fail to capture or represent the new understandings of the BA construction, including its semantic meanings and pragmatic functions (Xie 2003; Yang 2012). Zeng (2014) did a survey on the introduction and teaching of the BA construction as presented in 10 textbooks published both in China and overseas. She argues that, though all the textbooks introduce the restrictions on the elements that make the BA construction grammatical, including word order, the elements after the transitive verbs, the subject as the agent, and the definitiveness of the BA object, this type of instruction only helps learners decide whether a BA sentence is grammatical or not; it does not help them use this construction appropriately. She therefore recommends that the explanation and discussion should, instead, focus on the meaning and function of this construction, the conclusion of which is echoed in other studies (Xie 2003; Xiong 1996; Yu 2000). Unfortunately, Zeng discovered that seven of the 10 textbooks fail to categorize the different types of BA sentences, even though they introduce the construction across multiple units. Only two textbooks introduce the construction based on the semantic meanings it fulfills. One of the two textbooks focuses mainly on the elements within the verb phrase, including directional complements and resultative complements, which, strictly speaking, are more structure oriented than meaning oriented. And the only textbook that organizes instruction based on semantic meanings, namely, relocation, directional movement, and bringing about a result, fails to provide a more comprehensive introduction. Zeng proposes that the most frequently used types of BA categories summarized in Lyu (1994), including displacement, changes and results, relevance, and equivalence, should be the focus of instruction. She also argues that these types of BA constructions should be introduced in the following particular order: Displacement > Changes and Results > Relevance > Equivalence

Zeng’s analysis also reveals that 9 of the 10 textbooks discuss the function of the BA construction to some extent. Some of them give only a brief and form-based explanation and present this construction as a way to prepose the object. Others mention the disposal function that this construction fulfills. Three of the textbooks emphasize both the disposal meaning and the forms in which this meaning is realized. Previous research on the pragmatic function of research (e.g., Jin 1997) has already pointed out other factors involved in speakers’ use of the BA construction, such as the focus of the sentence and personal preferences. Textbooks should expose learners of

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Chinese—especially those at the advanced level—to other pragmatic factors to expand their understanding of this construction. Another issue revealed by Zeng (2014) is that textbooks are inclined to introduce the BA construction by comparing it to regular SVO sentences, and this usually involves exercises that ask learners to transform SVO sentences into BA sentences. It is understandable why this type of exercise is designed; SVO sentences represent the regular word order, and learners are already familiar with that. However, when introduced in this way, it becomes likely that learners will then take the BA construction as an alternative to SVO sentences and mistakenly consider the two types interchangeable. If SVO sentences are to be used in comparison, the difference in meaning between these sentences and their BA counterparts must be emphasized. Unfortunately, only 2 of the 10 textbooks that were examined address this. Other researchers (Cui 2011; Zhang 2012) have also looked into the way textbooks introduce the BA construction, particularly the SVO/BA equivalency misinterpretation. These studies collected L2 Chinese learners’ errors taken from corpora, including the HSK writing corpus, analyzed them, and proposed possible reasons for these errors, including the idea that the explanations given in textbooks may have led students to the wrong conclusion that BA sentences and SVO sentences are interchangeable. Zhang (2010) pointed out that some textbooks mispresent cases in which the use of the BA construction is optional as obligatory, which may contribute to the overuse of the construction (Zhang 2010, 273). Other researchers pointed out that most types of BA sentences are introduced in textbooks at the late-beginning and intermediate levels and are not reintroduced at later stages (Yang 2012; Xiong 1996; Yu 2000). These researchers suggest that the introduction of the different types should be less clustered and should be reviewed in later stages. Overall, it seems that textbooks, in omitting the most recent linguistic examinations of the BA construction and findings from second-language acquisitions studies, have failed to provide an effective explanation of its use (Sun 2010; Zeng 2014). Fortunately, many specialists in Chinese, including instructors and linguists, have also noticed these issues in the textbooks and have made specific suggestions on what to focus on and what to emphasize in the teaching of the BA construction (Lu 2016; Lyu 2010; Shi 2012; Sun 2010; Zhao 2006; Zhu 2020). They agree that the focus should be on the meaning and usage, especially on the constraints that make this construction unique and preferred. They also claim that the disposal meaning initiated by the agent is the core semantic property of the BA construction and, therefore, should, along with the situations in which the usage of the BA construction is obligatory, be introduced first.

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ISSUES ASSOCIATED WITH TEACHING THE BA CONSTRUCTION The teaching and learning process involves not only textbooks and other teaching materials but also, and more importantly, the instructors and students. Instructors have the responsibility of guiding students through the input from textbooks and directing their attention to the key elements and aspects of this structure. Are they doing this in an effective way? Instructors agree that teaching the BA construction is a challenge defined by many questions, including when and in what order to teach it, what methods they should use to facilitate its acquisition, whether these methods are effective, and whether empirical studies exist that investigate the effectiveness of these methods. The following section addresses these questions. Stages in the Teaching of the BA Construction and Their Optimal Teaching Order Several studies point out the importance of introducing the BA construction at an appropriate stage in relation to the teaching of other structures in Chinese. Some scholars suggest that the BA construction should be introduced after learners have already been exposed to the BEI structure, one of the passive voice structures in Chinese (Lyu 2010; Zhu 2020). They argue that there are structural similarities between the BA construction and the BEI structure, i.e., they both have a preposed noun phrase, and they both end with a verb phrase. A further similarity between them is that neither structure can take a bare verb in its verb phrase. However, it is easier for learners to understand the BEI structure because a highly similar counterpart is used in English to indicate the passive voice. In function, the BEI structure highlights the passive voice, whereas the BA construction highlights an “enhanced active voice.” Once learners understand the BEI structure, they can learn BA by reversing the order of the agent and the patient in the sentence. That there are many different sentence subtypes under the BA construction, either in terms of the functions they realize or the type of verb phrases they use, begs the question of whether some types should be introduced before others, and, if so, in what order they should be introduced. Most scholars agree that an order to the introduction of the functions of the BA construction is advisable; however, though Zeng has proposed a particular order, there has been no consensus among scholars on what order would be optimal. Some scholars argue that the cases in which the use of the BA construction is obligatory should be introduced first (Gao 1999; He 2007; Li and Deng 2005; Lin 2001; Ren 1998; Zhao 1994; Zhu 2020, among others). Among these scholars, some claim that the obligatory use, which fulfills

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the displacement meaning or, more generally, the disposal meaning, is the prototype of the BA construction (Shi 2012; Zeng 2014; Zhao 2006; Zhao 1994) and should, therefore, be introduced before the extended types. Other scholars agree that the obligatory BA sentence should be taught first but point to a different reason, namely, frequency of use in Chinese corpus data (JingSchmidtand and Peng 2015). Yu (2012) proposes a teaching order based on this frequency. The most frequently used BA sentences are those that indicate the displacement of the BA NP, followed by those that identify the BA NP with another item, followed by those that put an emphasis on results imposed by the activity. Wang (2011) proposes a different perspective on the order in which to teach this unique construction. He claims that theories that focus on the semantic meanings and the sentence components (verb, BA object, etc.) fail to provide clear explanations of the restrictions on the use of this construction. He therefore proposes incorporating a syntactic explanation. Specifically, he proposes that BA sentences be grouped based on the number of elements involved in the “event structure”: namely, two-element-event BA sentences, threeelement-event BA sentences, and four-element-event BA sentences. There is similarity (iconicity) between the event structure and the language form. The Chinese language is inclined to follow the sequence of the occurrence of the events in its word order. In addition, the “narrative starting point” also plays a role in the usage of the BA construction. The use of the BA construction is, therefore, the result of following the restriction on the time sequence in event occurrence and identifying the narrative starting point and its successive points. Taking this perspective, Wang argues that four-element-event BA sentences are obligatory and that three-element-event BA sentences are optional. The two-element-event BA sentences are far less productive than either the three- or four-element-event sentences, and they can be treated as a variant of the three-element-event BA sentence to express the speaker’s sympathy, blame, surprise, regret, and so on toward the event and people involved. He suggests that the four-element-event BA sentences should be introduced before the three-element-event sentences, and the highly atypical two-element-event BA sentences should be introduced last, if at all. Lu (2003) takes into consideration multiple factors, including structure, frequency, abstractness, usage, and genre, and proposes considering the following principles when teaching the BA construction: a) from simple structure to complex structure; b) from high frequency to low frequency; c) from concrete meaning to abstract meaning; d) from obligatory to contextpreferred; and e) from BA in spoken Chinese to BA in written Chinese. Based on these principles, he suggests an order for introducing the 32 subtypes of the BA construction that should be merged into different stages of Chinese studies, from beginning to advanced levels. Xie (2003) proposes that the

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most typical BA sentences should be introduced first, including those with a prepositional phrase or a directional complement after the verb. A study done by Zhang and Liu (1994) proposes an order based on the pragmatic functions the BA construction fulfills within and beyond the sentence. They suggest progressing from the discourse function, such as requests or describing procedures, to the pragmatic relationships between the BA sentence and its neighbors to the BA NP as the secondary topic, and finally, to the pragmatic meaning of the VP in the BA construction. Aspects to Highlight When Teaching the BA Construction Many scholars agree that it is not only unnecessary but, in fact, impossible to teach learners everything about the BA construction (Zhang and Liu 1994), especially at the beginning stage. If this is, indeed, the case, then what should be highlighted when teaching BA? The answer to this question comes from two types of research: the first focuses on errors made by L2 Chinese learners, including avoidance and overuse; the second focuses on comparisons between BA sentences and other types of sentences. Research on errors suggests that, once the error types have been identified, they should be the aspects that are highlighted in BA instruction. Since the 1990s, many studies have followed this line of reasoning. Lu (1994) summarizes four types of errors in L2 Chinese learners’ interlanguage grammar: (1) missing elements (e.g., missing verb complements); (2) extra elements; (3) misuse of elements; and (4) wrong word order. Zhang (2012) analyzed errors collected from the HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi: The Chinese Proficiency Test) writing corpus and found that avoidance or overuse were the two biggest issues; when a BA sentence was used, the errors arose mainly from the misuse of the verbs and their complements rather than from the word order. Her findings are similar to those of other error-analysis studies, including Cui (2011), Cheng (2006), Lyu (2008), and Yang (2012). Jiang (1999) argues that the placement of the negation word is also an issue, which is echoed in Cui (2011). The second type of research focuses on the comparison of the BA construction with other similar structures, including the BEI construction and its variations, 叫jiao and 让rang (Jiang 1999), and the topic-comment structure (Kin 2010), and proposes that the differences among these should be highlighted when teaching BA. Jiang (1999) points out that, though BA and BEI constructions have a similar surface structure—Subject + Prepositional NP + VP + X element, which can be confusing to Chinese learners—they have opposite deep meanings: in the BA construction, the agent is the subject; in the BEI construction, the patient is the subject. Kin (2010) argues that, because in English an object can be moved to the beginning of the sentence without requiring the use of a preposition, English-speaking L2 Chinese

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learners therefore tend to avoid using BA when they prepose the object in a Chinese sentence. Sun (2010) claims that the BA construction should be compared with a regular SVO sentence to help students understand that when we want to highlight the impact as a result of an activity, the BA construction is preferred. This approach could, to a certain extent, prevent the tendency to avoid this construction among L2 Chinese learners. Many scholars agree that the semantic and pragmatic meanings of the BA construction should be highlighted (Lyu 1994; Sun 2010; Yang 2012; Zhang 1999; Zhao 1994, among others). After a review of the proposals on the semantic meaning of the BA construction, Sun (2010) recommends adopting the causality theory because it has the strongest explanatory power among the available theories, and it is easier for learners to understand. Zhang and Liu (1994) argue that the pragmatic meaning and function of the BA construction should be explained using different context levels, beginning from within the BA construction and moving on to sentence groups, and then to paragraphs. They propose that the BA construction should be viewed from the perspective of functional grammar. Zhang and Liu (1994) also point out that the role of the noun phrase after BA should be highlighted in teaching. Cao (1987, cited in Zhang and Liu 1994) proposes that the BA NP fulfills the role of a secondary topic in a sentence, one which is related to the primary topic by the action indicated in the verb phrase. Zhang and Liu argue that this is important because the nature of the BA NP as a secondary topic explains some constraints on, as well as some special cases of, this construction. For example, the noun phrase introduced by BA must be definite, since a topic must be known information. In addition, sentences like 他把橘子剥了皮ta BA juzi bo le pi (He peeled the skin of the orange) are not hard to explain since the orange is the topic, and the agent did something to the orange, namely, he peeled it. The typical discourse relationships between the BA sentences and the sentences before or after them are characterized in this way in two studies by Zhang (1991 and 1999): a sentence to indicate the reason for the action + the BA sentence to indicate the means to bring about a certain result + a sentence to indicate the purpose of the action. Learners should be directed to the discourse relationships to understand when the BA construction is preferred. Other researchers emphasize that the constraints that make the BA construction grammatical—such as, for example, that the predicate of a BA sentence cannot be a bare verb—should not be ignored (Sun 2010; Wang 2010; Zhao 2006). In his review of textbooks, Sun (2010) noticed that most of them list the possible X elements as separate items in the BA construction: Subject + ba + verb + X element. He suggests that these items be introduced together with the verb combinations, such as verb + le，verb + complement, verb + zhe etc. Zhao (2006) and Wang (2010) both suggest that students be

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taught the types of verbs that can be used in the BA construction, along with the types of verbs that can be used with le to form the predicate in the BA construction. Students should also be reminded that stative verbs cannot be used in the BA construction. PROPOSED METHODS AND STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING THE BA CONSTRUCTION Introducing and Practicing BA in Contexts Many scholars point out that context provides concrete clues as to where the BA construction is preferred or obligatory and that these contexts should be highlighted when introducing it (Shi 2012; Song 2015; Sun 2010; Zhang and Liu 1994; Zhao 2006; Zhu 2020). Learners at the beginning level avoid using the BA construction, whereas learners at the advanced level tend to overuse it. Both these situations arise from a lack of awareness of the pragmatic functions that the BA construction fulfills, functions that are closely related to context. Introducing BA sentences in their contexts can develop students’ awareness of its appropriate deployment (Shi 2012). Contexts should be included throughout the process: from input, to practice, to output. Zhang and Liu (1994) suggest that students be directed to notice the different contextual levels, both within the construction (including the relationship between BA and the NP, and the relationship between the BA NP and the VP) and beyond the construction (including the relationship between the BA sentence and its predecessor and successor, as well as its connection to the whole discourse). They also suggest a top-down method when introducing the contexts: from discourse to sentence groups to the BA sentence itself (Zhang and Liu 1994, 86). Specifically, they suggest that at the beginning level, BA sentences used to make requests or introduce procedures should be presented first in the classroom environment. For example, the instructor can ask a student to open the door or to erase the blackboard, using facial expressions and body language to help students comprehend. Instructors can also teach students how to address an envelope in the Chinese way by using many BA sentences in their directions. At a more advanced level, instructors can expand their discussion to include the use of BA sentences in cause-effect or means-ends contexts by asking students to discuss how they can prevent their money from being stolen and encouraging them to provide solutions using BA sentences such as 把钱放在内衣口袋里 ba qian fang zai neiyi koudai li (Put your money in your inner pocket). Instructors can also expand the context to focus on a known event or person and invite discussion about that topic. For example, the instructor might show pictures of a person (Mr. Wang) and then ask questions such as “Why doesn’t Mr. Wang have a car anymore?” “Why

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is Mr. Wang’s chair broken?” Zhang and Liu (1994) propose a sequence for introducing the BA construction in contexts from a functional grammar perspective, viz., from the discourse in which the BA construction is used, to the string of sentences in which the construction is used, to the BA sentence, to the BA NP phrase. It is a pity that no follow-up studies have been conducted to test the effectiveness of this proposal. Zhao (2006) describes a classroom scenario that can help students understand the contexts in which the BA construction is used: An e-dictionary, a pen, a piece of paper, and a bottle of water are placed on a desk in a room. David comes in and puts the e-dictionary into his backpack. Mary is on the phone when she enters the room. She picks up the pen and tries to write something with it, but the pen breaks, so she throws it into the trashcan. Jin Zhehuan runs into the room, sweating and exhausted. He sits down and takes that bottle of water and drinks it all. Then, a gust of wind blows the piece of paper away. When Minxi, the owner of all the items, comes back a moment later, he can’t find any of the items he left on the desk. Minxi asks questions. Students are asked to answer his questions, first aloud, and then in written form. Though Zhao reports that his students started out using sentences in the regular SVO order, they switched to the BA construction once they understood the contexts.

Using the Focus-on-Form Approach to Teach the BA Construction Other scholars have highlighted the explicit or less explicit grammar explanation of the BA construction by using the Focus-on-Form instructional approach (Kou 2016; Tseng 2018). Unlike the Focus-on-Forms approach, which emphasizes presenting linguistic structures as discrete grammar rules, the Focus-on-Form approach emphasizes directing learners’ attention briefly to linguistic forms without losing the primary focus on meaningful interaction. This approach assumes that acquisition occurs best when the structure is needed for communication. Long (1991) argues that learners have limited processing resources and will not pay attention to grammatical forms if they understand what they read or hear. Only when they do not understand the input, will they pay attention to the grammatical forms, and this, therefore, is the optimal moment to teach them. EMPIRICAL STUDIES ON BA INSTRUCTION Although research over the past few decades has proposed approaches to, and principles and strategies for, teaching the BA construction, many of these

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studies are descriptive and suggestive in nature, without offering either any means of implementation in real classroom teaching or any way of measuring their outcomes. There are a few exceptions. In this section, a few empirical or quasi-empirical studies will be introduced and discussed. Tseng (2018) conducted a longitudinal study to investigate the output of the BA construction among beginning-level learners of L2 Chinese in the United States. Her study consisted of four rounds lasting 47–97 minutes each, spread across one week, and dedicated to teaching and practicing four types of BA construction, including relocation, resultative complement, directional complement, and 给(gei: to) + person/place. In the first two rounds, she reviewed the four types of BA sentences with examples and then had students practice the BA construction using contexts based on their personal experiences. In the third round, in addition to review and practice, she asked students to evaluate BA sentences and analyze the errors as a class. In the fourth round, in addition to the previous steps, students also discussed sample submissions from the previous round with a focus on the BA sentences and the contexts in which these sentences were used, including phrases and sentences. Students were asked to write a coherent paragraph describing their school life using as many different types of BA sentences as possible. After an analysis of the learners’ BA sentences, Tseng found that learners produced more BA sentences with higher accuracy as the rounds progressed. These are very encouraging findings, indicating that the instructor’s reflection on and revision in teaching practice can improve the accuracy of learners’ use of the BA construction. Unfortunately, this study did not control the steps involved in the instruction nor did it control the writing procedure, making it hard to deduce which of the practices actually helped learners produce more and better BA sentences. Moreover, the analysis showed only the average number of BA sentences produced and their accuracy rates. It would have been more helpful if the types of BA sentences and the error types had also been included so that more details could have been obtained regarding the quality of the BA sentences produced by learners after having experienced these different instruction procedures. The instruction as described in Tseng’s Appendix seems heavily focused on students’ production of the BA sentences under the instructor’s guidance, and thus it is not clear how the focus-on-form practice was implemented. Also unclear is whether or not the learners had been exposed to the BA construction before the instruction described in this study was employed. Kou (2016) reports on a more comprehensive five-step approach to teaching the BA construction to groups of beginning and intermediate L2 Chinese learners. Instruction began with a presentation of the BA sentences in contexts with brief, explicit explanations. Students were then directed to focus on the meanings conveyed by those BA sentences in their answers to structured

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questions such as: What is the person acting upon? What is the action? What changes happened to the item? The instructor then drilled the students on the construction, and this activity was followed by practice in which small groups of students created BA sentences that pertained to real-life-simulated situations and received corrective feedback from the instructor. The session concluded with a review of the rules governing this construction. Learning effectiveness was measured with a pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test of learners’ comprehension and production of the BA construction. A semistructured interview was also used to collect learners’ feedback on their learning experiences as well as on their knowledge of the BA construction. The overall results show that learners are better at comprehending the BA construction than producing the BA construction. The results from the comprehension tasks indicate that the learners did significantly better on the delayed post-test than on the pre-test, but not better than they did on the immediate post-test. The intermediate group outperformed the beginning level group on the cloze test, but not on the grammaticality judgment task. Both groups tended to accept BA sentences with a missing postverbal element as grammatical. The results from the production tasks show that the learners did significantly better on the immediate post-test than on the pre-test on both the translation task and the contextualized task, but on the delayed post-test, they performed better only on the contextualized task. The intermediate group showed no significant advantage over the beginning group on neither of the production tasks. Learners made more errors on specific components of the BA construction than they did on word order. The semistructured interview showed that the intermediate level students had better explicit knowledge on the usage and function of the BA construction than the beginning level group. Kou (2016) claims that explicit instruction helps learners map form with meaning while learning the BA construction. Kou’s study, to the best of this author’s knowledge, is the most comprehensive investigation of the effectiveness of instruction on the BA construction. It involved different types of BA sentences and learners at different proficiency levels of Chinese as well as comprehensive tasks that measure participants’ knowledge and performance. Although it is not plainly identified, it is clear that Kou’s study used a combination of the Focus-on-Forms approach and communicative-task based approach. Without a control group, however, it is difficult to pinpoint which approach played a more prominent role in the learning process. As one of the reading comprehension tasks, the cloze test did not test learners’ understanding of the BA sentences but, instead, tested their knowledge of word order or meanings of different complements. It is not surprising then, that the intermediate group did better in this task. The grammaticality judgment task employed in this study measured learners’ knowledge of the BA construction,

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which is different in nature than the cloze test, although both tasks were designed to measure learners’ comprehension. This difference may have affected the results. In the production tasks, there were no non-BA sentences, which failed to test learners’ awareness of when to use and when not to use the BA construction. What was actually tested in this study was whether learners knew how to use the BA construction. It is therefore not clear if learners’ awareness of BA usage actually improved after the instruction. Gao (2017) conducted an action research project in Taiwan with 10 Thaispeaking learners of Chinese. Not satisfied with the order in which textbooks introduce the BA construction, Gao, instead, altered the order in which she introduced the different types of BA sentences and investigated the effects. She taught the subtypes of BA sentences in 10 class sessions. As an action research study, the teaching practice she implemented in each session was revised based on her assessment of the outcome of the previous session. Generally, she used a large amount of input, student-teacher interaction, and tasks (including physical responses) in those sessions. She evaluated the effectiveness of these sessions through worksheets, quizzes, final assessments, and interviews. The results indicate that students became more motivated to learn, as indicated by their 100% completion of worksheets, and that students reduced mistakes in their use of the BA construction. As Kou (2016) did in his instruction, Gao used a great variety of different tasks and strategies in teaching the BA construction. This may be inspirational for other Chinese language instructors, however, from a researcher’s point of view, these studies did not successfully test the effectiveness of any particular instructional approach.

CHAPTER SUMMARY This chapter mainly discusses research on the instruction of the BA construction. One important takeaway is that very few studies used a well-designed experimental approach to specifically test the effectiveness of approaches and strategies in helping students learn this notoriously difficult construction. Among the few empirical or quasi-empirical studies, none identified the theoretical framework upon which they designed their instructional approaches, which makes it hard to compare their studies with studies on other languages or with other instructional approaches. That said, it must also be pointed out that a whole body of research has contributed to the instruction of the BA construction from different angles, including when to teach it, in what order to teach it, what element(s) to highlight when teaching it, and specific strategies to use when teaching it. Since many of the studies reviewed in this chapter have also discussed the linguistic

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features and properties of the BA construction and have based their discussion of the BA instruction on these features, this type of research also refreshes and deepens Chinese language instructors’ understanding of this unique construction. Some consensus can be reached from the previous research along this line, with one area of agreement being that the introduction of the BA construction in textbooks should be informed by and updated with the most recent findings from the linguistic research on BA, and another being that the BA construction, with its various linguistic restrictions, semantic meanings, and pragmatic functions, should not be taught either randomly or all at once, but, instead, should be taught following a particular order, starting with the most typical usage and expanding to less typical ones. In addition, many studies have pointed out the importance of introducing or practicing the BA construction in context to help students understand when and why the BA construction is required or preferred. Based on the gaps identified through a review of existing studies on how to teach the BA construction effectively, an empirical study was designed and conducted to explore whether a particular grammar instruction approach that has been adopted in other foreign language classrooms, namely the Processing Instruction (PI) approach, can facilitate L2 Chinese learners’ mastery of the BA construction. In chapter 6, the PI approach and the Input Processing theory, the second-language acquisition theory that this approach is based on, will be introduced, followed by a review of previous studies that explore the effectiveness of the PI approach in teaching grammar to learners of different foreign languages.

Chapter 4

Acquisition of the BA Construction An Interface Perspective

CHAPTER INTRODUCTION A review of previous studies on the acquisition of the BA construction has identified some gaps that could be filled by future studies. Most studies are corpus based and collect production data from written texts. Although corpus-based data offers natural production of BA sentences, it is hard to control the number and type of BA sentences that can be collected from learners. In addition, there are other factors that may have an impact on the frequency of use of the BA construction, factors such as the prompts used to elicit the written texts among learners at different proficiency levels. Related to the corpusbased research method, many studies are descriptive in nature, providing error rates on the different types of BA sentences predetermined by researchers as well as error patterns identified from the corpus data. For those studies that used empirical designs, the examples used for each type of BA sentence are limited. Some studies only used one sentence as a model for one type, a practice that makes the results less reliable. What these two types of studies lack is a second-language-acquisition theoretical framework that would not only allow the BA construction to be explored from a similar perspective as studies on other L2s but also make it possible to compare the results of BA studies with other studies. Topic-wise, most previous studies explored learners’ production of the BA construction, which is also closely related to the corpus-based data-collection methods. Only a few studies explored learners’ comprehension, and even fewer examined learners’ awareness of when to use BA and when not to use BA. The study presented in this chapter attempts to address some of the gaps identified in the reviews of previous studies. It explores learners’ acquisition of the BA construction from the perspective of the Interface Hypothesis (IH), 77

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a theoretical framework from the field of second-language acquisition. IH proposes that the nature of the linguistic property plays a role in the ultimate results in L2 acquisition: properties that involve only pure syntactic knowledge are completely attainable, whereas properties that call for knowledge from interfaces, especially from the syntax/pragmatics interface, are harder to acquire and may not be totally attainable. In chapter 1, the properties of the BA construction were discussed, including those that are purely syntactic constraints and those that involve the interfaces between syntax and other domains. This chapter reports on the current study, which used the IH theory to investigate the acquisition of those properties by English-speaking learners of Chinese as a foreign language. The aim of the present study is twofold: (1) to investigate learners’ knowledge of the different constraints on the BA construction in the core syntax domain and the interface domains; and (2) to test how well IH can explain and predict differences in learners’ knowledge of the target properties. First, a brief introduction to IH and a review of previous representative studies that have been conducted using IH will be provided. Following that, the goals and hypotheses of this study will be described, followed by an introduction to the methodology, including the participants, tasks, and procedure of the study. Then the results of those tasks will be reported and analyzed, followed by a discussion of the results in light of previous research. The chapter will conclude by offering some takeaways from the research questions. THE INTERFACE HYPOTHESIS AND PREVIOUS STUDIES In the field of second-language acquisition, the past decade has seen an expansion in the focus of research from pure syntactic properties to properties that involve multiple domains. Many studies have found that there is an asymmetrical pattern in L2 learners’ interlanguages that consists of a convergence in their knowledge of syntactic constraints of a parameter or a particular construction, and a divergence from native grammars when the knowledge at the interfaces between syntax and pragmatics/discourse is involved. Several explanations have been put forth based on findings from these studies. The Interface Hypothesis Sorace (2005) proposes a generalization about the asymmetrical pattern observed in studies of L2 acquisition and L1 attrition. She claims that a focus on the differences between end-state L2 grammar and native grammar can help us learn how far L2 acquisition can go. It is argued that there

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is difference between end-state L2 grammar and native grammar. However, the difference is not across the board but selective: some areas remain stable while other areas are more vulnerable to various factors. This vulnerable area is what IH addresses. IH claims that constructions that belong to the syntax proper are fully acquired in L2 acquisition . . . . In contrast, constructions that require the integration of syntactic knowledge and knowledge from other domains present residual optionality in L2. (Sorace 2005, 55–56)

Sorace (2005) also emphasizes the fact that IH does not claim that syntactic aspects are easier to acquire, rather that the aspects of grammar which require an integration of syntactic knowledge and knowledge from other domains are either acquired later or never completely acquired. Sorace and Serratrice (2009) propose a refined version of IH, one that makes a distinction between the syntax-semantics interface and the syntax-discourse/ pragmatics interface. The syntax-semantics interface “involves formal features and operations within syntax and logical form,” whereas the syntaxdiscourse/pragmatics interface “involves pragmatic conditions that determine appropriateness in context” (Sorace and Serratrice 2009, 197). They claim that the different natures of the interfaces pose different challenges for L2 learners: the syntax-semantics interface structures are acquirable, while structures that involve the syntax-discourse/pragmatics interfaces are problematic. Their recent refinement of IH better accommodates the findings from studies that explored the acquisition of syntax-semantics interface properties. As for the reasons for this residual optionality at the syntax-discourse/ pragmatics interface, Sorace and Serratrice (2009) systematically discussed most of the possible factors: under-specification of interpretable features, cross-linguistic influence in representation, processing limitations, and the quality and quantity of L2 input. After citing the results from two recent studies (Serratrice et  al. 2009; Sorace et  al. 2009), Sorace and Serratrice claim that the influence of these factors varies based on the nature of the interface. Syntax-discourse/pragmatics interface structures are less sensitive to cross-linguistic influence. Rather, they are “more vulnerable to processing costs” (Sorace and Serratrice 2009, 204). Sorace and Serratrice argue that L2 speakers’ grammar is less “automatic,” and their ability to integrate syntactic knowledge with knowledge from other domains is thus also “suboptimal,” which may cause them to use “default strategies” or turn to more “economical” options. Though the cross-linguistic influence plays a more important role in the acquisition of syntax-semantics interface structures, both interfaces are sensitive to the quantity of input of L2. Reduced input will “increase the magnitude of the effect” (Sorace and Serratrice 2009, 207).

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In her keynote article in the first issue of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism (Sorace (2011), Sorace reviews more recent research on IH, further clarifies the scope its prediction extends, and addresses “some common misinterpretations” of IH. In this article, she provides a more precise definition of “interface” by arguing that interface “refers to syntactic structures that are sensitive to conditions of varying nature” (Sorace 2011, 6). These conditions must be satisfied in order for the structure to be grammatical and felicitous. While insisting that “not all interfaces are created equal,” Sorace attempts to limit IH to the prediction and explanation of syntax-pragmatics interface optionality since the reasons for this make up the bulk of her discussion. She proposes that the processing account may better explain the problem than the representation account. Bilinguals (including near-native L2 learners, learners experiencing first-stage L1 attrition, or those involved in L1 acquisition in a bilingual setting such as a bilingual family) are less efficient than monolinguals in integrating information from different sources, because they have “fewer general cognitive resources to deploy” (Sorace 2011, 15), with some cognitive resources spared to inhibit the language that is not in use. She also proposes that the concept of “a gradient” may better differentiate structures than does the concept of “a rigid dichotomy.” Previous Studies on Properties at Interfaces There are studies that investigated the acquisition of properties that require knowledge from the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic or discourse domains. Most of these studies explored L2 languages from the Romance languages family, including French, Italian, and Spanish. Studies on the Properties of the Syntax-Semantics Interface Studies on the acquisition of syntactic-semantic interface properties indicate that there is a relatively high convergence of L2 grammar with that of native speakers. Dekydtspotter and Sprouse, as pointed out by Slabakova (2006), are the forerunners in this area. They have conducted many studies on the acquisition of the properties of the syntax-semantics interface among English-speaking learners of French. They targeted situations in which word-order options in learners’ L2 (French) result in a subtle distinction in interpretation, which is nonexistent in L1 (English) because English lacks such syntactic alternations (Dekydtspotter and Sprouse 2001; Dekydtspotter, Sprouse, and Swanson 2001). The results indicate that L1 English learners of L2 French can acquire the different interpretations of case as a result of word order, which is a property of the syntactic-semantic interface. Borgonovo, Garavito, and Prevost (2005) investigated knowledge of mood (subjunctive vs. indicative) in Spanish relative sentences among L1

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English learners of L2 Spanish (advanced vs. intermediate). In Spanish, the choice of mood is determined by the specificity of the Determiner Phrase (DP), which is interpreted through context. Their results indicate that the advanced learners managed to distinguish the subjunctive mood from the indicative mood in various contexts, similar to the performance of native Spanish speakers. They thus concluded that knowledge at the syntactic/ semantic interface is attainable. Yuan (2010) investigated the acquisition of wh-words as existential polarity words (EPWs) among L2 learners of Chinese who were native speakers of English and Japanese. Wh-words in Chinese are multifunctional: they can act as interrogative words, universal quantifiers, and EPWs, as in 1): 1） a.

b.

c.

你 想 买 什么 Ni Xiang mai shenme You Want buy what “What do you want to buy?” 我 什么 都 想 Wo shenme dou xiang I what all want “I want to buy everything.” 我 不 想 买 Wo bu xiang mai I not want buy “I don’t want to buy anything.” (Yuan 2010, 220)

(呢) ? (ne) ? (wh-Q) 买 mai Buy 什么 shenme what

In 1)a, the wh-word shenme is an interrogative word; in 1)b, it works as a universal quantifier; and in 1)c, shenme is an EPW. There are syntactic as well as semantic constraints that affect when wh-words in Chinese can work as EPWs, and there are different situations where these constraints are satisfied. The results of Yuan’s study indicate that L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of the wh-words as EPWs varies across situations. He thus proposes a “variation-specific” rather than a “domain-wide” perspective on the issue of syntactic/semantic interface acquisition. Yuan also proposes several possible factors that could affect L2 learners’ acquisition of these syntactic/semantic interface properties, including cross-linguistic influence, input, the categorical nature of elements involved, and so on. Yuan’s study goes one step further along the line of research in this area, and the factors that he attributes to the observed variation also provide fodder for further exploration.

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To sum up, most studies which have investigated the acquisition of the syntactic-semantic interface properties seem to indicate that these properties, subtle as they may be, are acquirable and that native-like attainment is possible. However, more research on properties of L2s other than Romance languages is needed before a clearer picture can be obtained. Studies on the Properties of the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface Unlike the results that most syntax-semantics interface studies obtained, results obtained from the syntax-discourse interface studies show greater divergence in L2 learners’ interlanguage grammar from that of native speakers. Many studies (Belletti, Bennati, and Sorace 2007; Hopp 2004; Lozano 2006; Sorace 2003, among others) observe that the acquisition of properties involving syntax and discourse interface domains exhibits more instability and vulnerability than the acquisition of core syntax properties. One category of discourse that has been most frequently investigated is topic and focus. Topic conveys old information known to the speaker and the listener. It indicates what the utterance is about. Focus is the new information the speaker wants to convey, and it advances the discourse. The information structure is realized differently in different languages, including through different syntactic structures. Most investigations on topic focus on the presence or absence of the subject in null subject languages like Spanish and Italian. In a null subject language, the presence of a subject is optional. However, the choice of an overt subject or a null subject is by no means random; it is governed by some discourse constraints. When the subject is known information, and there is no shift in the topic, a null subject is preferred. On the other hand, when there is a shift in topic, or when a contrast is intended, an overt subject is preferred. Multiple studies have explored the use of null subject or overt subject in different L2 languages (e.g., Italian or Greek) by learners speaking different L1s (English, French, German, or Russian). Similarly, they found that learners showed a better performance—even a native-like performance—when an overt subject was preferred. Interestingly, although learners showed a preference for null subjects over overt subjects, they also showed an overuse of overt subjects when a null subject was preferred (Belletti, Bennati, and Sorace 2007; Belletti and Leonini 2004; Sorace 2005; Tsimpli and Sorace 2006). However, Ivanov (2009) arrived at a different conclusion than did the studies discussed above. It explored how well a syntax-discourse property in Bulgarian is acquired by English-speaking learners of Bulgarian. In Bulgarian, when the object becomes the topic, clitic doubling is used, and “undoubled” object topics are infelicitous. The results indicate that intermediate L2 learners of Bulgarian do not distinguish between the felicitous and infelicitous

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options and thus fail to show native-like convergence in this respect. However, advanced L2 learners can show native-like performance in the use of this property. To sum up, studies on L2 learners’ performance on structures related to the discourse factor of topic and focus mainly explored the use of the null or overt subject in null subject languages. Most studies concluded that L2 learners have difficulty in fully acquiring the discourse-related interface properties. However, a few studies arrived at a different conclusion. Clearly, before any consensus can be reached, more studies that explore other discourse-relevant properties in other target languages must be conducted. THE GOAL OF THIS STUDY The purpose of the present study was to employ the IH framework (Sorace 2005 and 2011; Sorace and Serratrice 2009) to investigate what effect, if any, the nature of the target properties has on the successful acquisition of the BA construction by L2 Chinese learners. Although Sorace (2011) excludes intermediate L2 learners from the scope of what IH will predict, many scholars (Lardiere 2011; White 2011) question the wisdom of doing so. White (2011) encourages researchers to extend and test “the IH in domains where it was not originally intended to apply” (White 2011, 110). Research Questions The present study took those scholars’ advice and investigated whether or not the IH can be extended to explain L2 development in addition to the ultimate acquisition of the BA construction among near-native speakers. The specific research questions of this study are stated as follows: 1. In acquiring the BA construction in Chinese, does L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of the properties differ when the properties are purely syntactic than when they involve integration of knowledge from other domains? More specifically, the following two questions are asked: a.  Does L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of the core syntax domain differ from their acquisition of the syntax-semantics interface domain? b.  Does L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of the core syntax domain differ from their acquisition of the syntax-discourse interface domain? 2. Does the nature of the interface play a role in L2 learners’ acquisition. In this case, does their acquisition of the syntax-semantics interface domain differ from their acquisition of the syntax-discourse domain?

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3. Does the advantage or disadvantage regarding an interface domainwise or there is variation within the same domain? In this case, does L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of the two properties that involve the syntax-semantics interface domain differ? Target Properties of the BA Construction As a reminder as what has been discussed in previous chapters about the properties of the BA construction, a brief summary of the properties investigated in this study is provided here. In order to be grammatical, the BA construction must operate within many constraints. The word order constraint is the most salient one and is purely syntactic. It follows the word order of (subject) + BA + noun phrase + verb + other elements. Two constraints that involve knowledge from the interfaces between syntax and semantics were investigated in this study: (1) the verb used in the BA construction must be complex, which means the verb must have a complement after it or, occasionally, an adverb before it to achieve a result; and (2) the noun phrase that follows BA (the BA NP) must be affected as a result of the action indicated by the verb and its complement. Moreover, the use of the BA construction is preferred when the BA NP becomes a topic in the discourse, which is a property that involves the syntax-discourse interface. Hypotheses Using the IH, the following general hypotheses were made concerning the research questions listed above: 1. L2 Chinese learners have acquired a better knowledge of the core syntactic constraints on the BA construction than of the constraints at the interfaces between syntax and other domains by achieving a significantly higher accuracy rate in the former than in the latter. (Accuracy is measured in percentage of correct responses out of possible correct responses.) 2. L2 Chinese learners have acquired a better knowledge of the syntaxsemantics properties than of the syntax-discourse properties by achieving a significantly higher accuracy rate in the use of the former constraint than in the latter one. 3. The L2 Chinese learners’ acquisition of the two syntax-semantics properties differs as a result of variance within the interface domain (Based on Yuan 2010).

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METHOD Participants Thirty-eight native speakers of Chinese and 32 English-speaking learners of Chinese participated in this study. Eighteen native speakers of Chinese participated in the pilot test to decide the validity of the sentences used in the tasks. Twenty native speakers participated in the experimental study as a control group to provide a baseline. They were all undergraduates at a university in Southeast China. The 32 L2 Chinese participants were students enrolled in Chinese classes at different levels at a large university in the American Midwest at the time this study was conducted. Most of them were enrolled in Level II or Level III Chinese classes. Table 4.1 summarizes their demographic features: Nineteen L2 participants (59.4%) were enrolled in Level II Chinese, 10 students (31.2%) in Level III, and three students (9.4%) in Level IV. A cloze test (Yuan 2010) was given to all L2 participants to assess their proficiency level. Due to the great variance among L2 participants, the participants were put into two groups based on their scores: those who fell below the average score were grouped together (the L2 Low Group hereafter); those who scored above the average were grouped together (the L2 High Group hereafter). Grouping the L2 learners according to their proficiency level made it possible to achieve a better understanding of the development of L2 learners’ acquisition of the target properties. Tasks Two tasks were designed and used in the present study. In each task, the sentences were presented using two versions of Chinese characters: traditional and simplified. Each version had Pinyin above the characters. Neither of the tasks was timed; however, students were asked to make their judgments as quickly as possible. Task 1 was a grammaticality judgment task in which the participants were presented with individual sentences and asked to judge whether the sentence was Table 4.1  Demographic Features of the L2 Chinese Participants Demographic Features Gender Age Age at outset of learning Length of learning Residence in a Chinese-speaking region Source: Author.

Mean (range) F = 16; M = 16 22.7 (19–40) 19.6 (14–27) 3.1 years (1–8) 0.5 years (0–7)

S.D. n/a 4.2 3.1 4.2 1.4

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grammatical or ungrammatical. This task measured participants’ knowledge of the properties of the “core” syntax domain and the syntax-semantics domains— namely, the word order constraint, the complex verb constraint, and the affectedness of the BA NP constraint. Altogether, this task comprised 80 sentences. The distribution of all the sentences in each category is shown in table 4.2. Each constraint was presented through eight pairs of sentences, with each pair consisting of one grammatical sentence and one ungrammatical sentence that were identical except for the target property. The vocabulary used in this task and the other task was mostly limited to words that L2 participants had learned. For the few words that might have been new to the L2 Low Group, brief definitions in English were given. Task 2 was a contextual acceptability preference task in which the students were presented with a context in English and asked to pick the one sentence from the two provided in Chinese that they thought was more appropriate in the context. For each context, a BA sentence and an SVO sentence were presented. This task measured participants’ knowledge of the syntax-discourse property of the BA construction, i.e., the BA NP as a secondary topic. The distribution of the sentences in this task is shown in table 4.3. Two rounds of pilot tests were conducted among 18 native speakers of Chinese to establish the validity of the sentences used in all tasks. For the grammaticality judgment tasks, a 90% consistency criterion was followed, whereas for the contextual task, a 75% consistency rate was used. Both tasks were completed on computer using Paradigm, a software program designed for experimental studies in behavioral science. The tasks were untimed, and the sentences remained on the screen until the participants provided an answer by clicking the corresponding answer on the screen. There were two practice trials before the actual tasks started. Table 4.2  Distribution of Sentences in the Grammaticality Judgment Task Target Properties Word order constraint Complex verb constraint Affectedness constraint Distracters (regular SVO)

Grammatical 8 8 8 16

Ungrammatical 8 8 8 16

Source: Author.

Table 4.3  Distribution of Sentences in the Contextual Preference Task BA sentences/SVO sentences Distractersi

BA-Preferred Context 8/8 4/4

SVO-Preferred Context 8/8 4/4

Source: Author. i Distractors include sentences that use model verbs or a potential complement after the verb.

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Procedure All L2 participants signed an informed consent form before they were assigned a study code to use instead of their names. The L2 learners completed the proficiency test in class using paper and pens. They then, one-byone, completed the experimental tasks on a different day on the researcher’s laptop. Students completed a brief demographic survey before starting the tasks, and the tasks were completed in the researcher’s office. The researcher was present during the two trials and made sure that all participants understood what was expected of them before leaving them on their own to complete the tasks. In order to avoid test fatigue, the 80 sentences in Task 1 were grouped into two sections, with the sentences from each target property and the number of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences balanced out. For Task 2, all the sentences were put into one section. There were, therefore, three sections in all. Within each section, the sentences were presented in a random order. Participants were required to take a short break between the two sections. Half of the participants followed the sequence of Task 1 (Section 1, then Section 2), and Task 2, and the other half followed the sequence of Task 1 (Section 2, then Section 1), and Task 2. As for the native speakers of Chinese: this researcher flew to China to collect data. The procedure followed abroad was similar to the one followed in the United States, though the native speakers completed the proficiency test and the experimental tasks in a single sitting. All of them completed the tasks on the researcher’s laptop. Scoring Procedure In both tasks, participants scored one point for a correct judgment (Task 1) or a correct choice (Task 2). They scored zero for an incorrect judgment or choice. The total points on each task were then divided by the total possible points, and the results were converted into percentages reflecting accuracy rates. In order to form a more specific picture of their performance on each task, a second score, the acceptance score, was used; that is, the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences accepted by participants were calculated separately. Ideally, the acceptance rate for grammatical sentences would be 100% with an acceptance rate of 0% for ungrammatical ones. The acceptance rates gave a more complete picture as to how well the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences were distinguished from one another. Data Analysis Procedures Cronbach’s Coefficient Alpha tests were used to compute internal consistency reliability for each property investigated in this study. The results are presented in table 4.4:

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Table 4.4  Internal Consistency Reliability for Properties from Different Domains Properties Word order Complex V. Affectedness Topic

Cronbach’s Alpha .352 .699 .372 .557

Cronbach’s Alpha Based on Standardized Items .164 .689 .255 .496

No. of Items 11* 15** 12*** 16

*Five items had zero variance and were removed from the scale. **One item had zero variance and was removed from the scale. ***Four items had zero variance and were removed from the scale. Source: Author.

For each target property investigated in this study—word-order constraint, complex verb constraint, BA NP affectedness constraint, and the BA NP as a secondary topic constraint—means and standard deviations were calculated. In order to identify the possible differences between L2 learners’ knowledge of different properties of the BA construction, a series of repeated-measures ANOVAs were conducted to compare their accuracy rates across these properties. More specifically, comparisons were made between a) the core syntax property (word order constraint) and syntax-semantics interface properties (complex verb constraint and BA NP affectedness constraint combined); b) the core syntax property and the syntax-discourse interface property (the BA NP as topic); c) the syntax-semantics interface properties versus the syntaxdiscourse property; and d) the two syntax-semantics interface properties: complex verb constraint versus BA NP affectedness constraint. The native speaker group was used as a baseline for comparison. The L2 learners were examined in two groups (the grouping criterion is discussed above). Property was the one within-subject independent variable, and group was the one between-subject independent variable. As for the second measurement, acceptance rates were also compared using repeated-measures ANOVAs. In those tests, there were two within-subject independent variables (property and grammaticality) and one betweensubject independent variable (group).

RESULTS Core Syntax Property Versus SyntaxSemantics Interface Properties Task 1 examined participants’ knowledge of the core syntax property and the two properties involving the syntax-semantics interface. The results are presented in figure 4.1.

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Acquisition of the BA Construction

Figure 4.1  Accuracy Rates (%) on Core Syntax and Syntax-Semantics Properties across Groups. Credit: Author. Table 4.5  Pairwise Comparisons of L2 High Group: Syntax and Syntax-Semantics Properties Pair Word Order-Complex V. Word Order-Affectedness Complex V.-Affectedness

Mean Difference 21.3* 23.9* 2.6

Std. Error 3.79 3.72 3.83

*The mean difference is significant at the .05 level. Source: Author.

The accuracy rates of the native speaker group (NS Group) across the properties were as follows: 99.7 (SD = 1.4) for the word order constraint, 98.1 (SD = 4.1) for the complex verb constraint, and 97.2 (SD = 4.3) for the affectedness constraint. A one-way repeated-measures ANOVA test indicated that there was no significant difference across the properties [Wilks’s ʌ  =  .747, F(2, 18) = 3.056, p = .072]. The L2 High Group scored 95.6 (SD = 7.3), 74.3 (SD = 15.5), and 71.1 (SD  =  12.9) for the word order constraint, the complex verb constraint, and the affectedness constraint, respectively. A one-way repeated-measure ANOVA test indicated a significant difference across the properties [Wilks’s ʌ = .244, F(2, 15) = 23.247, p