Does lexical aspect influence patterns of negation in L2 Mandarin produced by native English speakers?
Friday, January 13, 10 AM – 11 AM EST
Kevin Fedewa, Second Language Studies, Michigan State University

Zoom Information:
https://msu.zoom.us/j/97552480452
Meeting ID: 975 5248 0452
Passcode: 719357

This study explores the uses of the primary Chinese negation words, bu (不) and mei (没), by native English speakers with the aim to assess (i) to what extent lexical aspect affects the uses of bu and mei in L2 Mandarin and (ii) whether transfer effects from English to L2 Mandarin can be captured. The use of either bu or mei is closely tied to aspect. Specifically, “bu is semantically incompatible with aspect markers denoting realization” (Xu, 1997, as paraphrased by Xiao & McEnery, 2008: 291), and bu does not co-occur with perfective viewpoints (Xiao & McEnery, 2008). Mei, however, is compatible with experiential and actual aspects: positive forms of actual and experiential aspects tend to be more frequent than negative forms (Xiao & McEnery, 2008). Further, native Mandarin speakers rarely negate progressive and durative aspects (Xiao & McEnery, 2008). Altogether, these trends contrast sharply with English where negating actual, experiential, progressive, and durative aspects is common.

These typological differences strongly suggest the existence of negative L1 transfer effects as L1 English learners would likely not have received input with negation of these aspectual categories. While the difficulties of using bu and mei by L2 Mandarin learners is well documented, methodologically, existing research remains based on experimental approaches focused on the acquisition of negation and aspect (Yan, 2013), negation and mood (Wang & Chan, 2021), as well as modals and negation (Peng & Zhu, 2017). In this context, the present study builds on existing research by adopting a quantitative corpus-based approach to explore to what extent learners rely on L1 transfer or Mandarin input or both in their production of negative forms, as their interlanguage develops.

Methodologically, bu/mei constructions are investigated in context as extracted from the written components of the Global Chinese Interlanguage Texts Corpus (http://qqk.blcu.edu.cn), and manually annotated against temporal and aspectual categories. Additionally, L2 Mandarin users’ positive and negative ratios of the perfective, experiential aspect marker, –guo (过), and the imperfective progressive zai (在), the durative –zhe (着), the inceptive –qilai (起来), and continuative –xiaqu (下去)  aspectual markers are compared against native speakers’ positive and negative forms ratios. This study bears possible important pedagogical implications that align with Data-Driven Learning approaches to second-language instruction.

References:

Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Language Resources. (2019-). Global Chinese Interlanguage Texts Corpus. Available at http://qqk.blcu.edu.cn.

Li, Y. (2013). Acquisition of the Aspectual Meanings of Negation Markers in Mandarin Chinese by English-speaking L2 Chinese Learners. Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association. http://hdl.handle.net/1808/12469  

Peng, J., & Zhu, D. (2017). English speakers’ acquisition of Chinese modals. Chinese as a Second Language Research, 6(1), 149–174. DOI 10.1515/caslar-2017-0007 

Xiao, R., McEnery, T. (2008). Negation in Chinese: A corpus based study. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 36(2), 274–320. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23756111

Wang, J., & Chan, Y. H. C. (2021). A feature-based approach to the acquisition of L2 Chinese negation by L1-English and L1-Korean learners. Lingua, 252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.103018