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Another Look at 'Verb Raising' in the L2 English of Chinese Speakers
Wei Chu and Bonnie D. Schwartz
57-74 (complete pdf)
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This paper reports a partial replication of White's (1991) French-English Interlanguage study on adverb placement with Chinese-English Interlanguage, except with non-thematic verbs (i.e. modals; auxiliary and copula be) as well as thematic verbs. The findings show (i) that for thematic verbs, the *SVAO acceptance rate of the Chinese learners of English was substantially lower than that of White's French learners of English, and (ii) that for non-thematic verbs, the subjects in this study were much more accurate with negation than with adverb placement. The authors suggest that L1 transfer is a pivotal cause of L2 English SVAO errors (following White), but that capturing the full range of L2 results necessitates properties of Target Language input shouldering some explanatory burden.



Published in:
Proceedings of the 7th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2004)
edited by Laurent Dekydtspotter, Rex A. Sprouse, and Audrey Liljestrand

Table of contents

ISBN 978-1-57473-406-5 library binding
v + 291 pages
publication date: 2005
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA

Printed edition: $280.00



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