英语Tough结构可习得性问题初探.pdfVIP

Guangzhou, China Modern Foreign Languages (Quarterly) Vol.24 No.2 April 2001: 159-169 A Tentative Study of the Learnability Problem on the Learning of English Tough Constructions by Chinese EFL Learners CHEN Ji-dong The present study tackles a learnability problem concerning the learning of English tough constructions, such as John is hard to fool, by Chinese EFL learners. Syntactically, tough construction crucially involves a tough predicate, and indicates an underlying subject-patient/theme relationship between the matrix subject and the infinitival verb. Empirical studies of L1 acquisition reveal that L1 learners even at the age of eight still tend to misinterpret tough constructions as the subject-raising structure. Previous L2 research discovers that EFL learners interpretation of tough construction develops from subject-agent mapping interpretation to the correct subject-patient/theme mapping interpretation, and that the knowledge of EFL learners L1 deeply affects their acquisition of tough construction. Concerning Chinese EFL learners, Yip (1995) notified a learnability problem of overpassivization and overgeneralization of subject raising to tough construction by Chinese Hong Kong EFL learners. Linguistic analysis of English tough constructions and relevant Chinese structures show that Chinese allows both subject raising and object raising with easy type of tough adjectives, which is argued to be a more general phenomena of Chinese topicalization and topic raising. For other types of tough adjectives, Chinese generally lacks exact counterparts but only has analogous sentential infinitival subject structures. To investigate the knowledge of Chinese EFL learners about tough constructions, an empirical study was conducted. The results reveal that the learnability problem of overpassivization and ove