The Acquisition of Argument Mapping in Chinese Learners of English as a Foreign Language: A Processability Approach

Abstract

This thesis investigates the mapping from thematic roles to grammatical functions in English as a Foreign Language (EFL). It furthermore explores whether there is evidence for a staged development based in general cognitive processing constraints, as posited in the Lexical Mapping Hypothesis (LMH) within Processability Theory (PT). The relationship between a verb and its arguments is core to both linguistic theory and the field of Language Acquisition, yet this area is under-researched. Acquisition studies undertaken so far within frameworks such as UG and Usage-based research have typically focused on isolated verb groups, thus skirting a comprehensive approach to argument structure. The Lexical Mapping Hypothesis within PT provides a principled framework for a comprehensive exploration of the L2 acquisition of predicate-argument structure, in terms of mapping from thematic roles to grammatical functions, across a wide range of verb types and their arguments. With its recent updating, the LMH proposes a universal, theoretically grounded schedule of stages of development applicable to individual languages. Some languages have already been empirically investigated with positive results. However, empirical investigation of the schedule for English as a second/foreign language only counts, so far, a single two-year longitudinal dataset on one Japanese child learner. Hence, data from different learner types (i.e., from different age groups and L1 backgrounds) producing a wider range of verbs and construction types is a necessary requirement to further test the LMH empirically. As a contribution to bridging this gap, the current study investigates cross-sectional speech data from 37 university learners of EFL in China, collected from a nationally mandated oral proficiency exam. All learners were native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, majoring in English. Their level of proficiency was ranked between intermediate and advanced, according to the exam raters. A preliminary analysis of all clauses produced by each of the learners, generated a data set of 2089 clauses with a lexical verb as predicate, in which 19 different types of predicate-argument structures were identified. These were analysed at the levels of argument structure (LFG's a-structure), functional structure (LFG's f-structure), and the mapping relations between them. The results pioneer the provision of a comprehensive picture of EFL learners' interlanguage predicate-argument system. The thesis then interprets the findings in light of PT's Lexical Mapping Hypothesis. Following PT's tradition, qualified structures were analysed by applying the emergence criterion. The results showed no counterevidence for the developmental sequence proposed in the Lexical Mapping Hypothesis. Furthermore, results for implicational scaling of the structures within the LMH's 'default mapping and additional argument stage' and within the 'nondefault mapping stage' point to language-specific intra-stage developments for English L2, which are assumed but not specified in the LMH.