Ubiquitous but elusive, the Chinese ba-construction has attracted a great deal of attention in Chinese linguistics, but its acquisition by second language (L2) learners has not been investigated systematically. This monograph, based on the author's doctoral dissertation, presents an interesting and innovative treatment of the acquisition of the Chinese ba-construction by native speakers of English. The volume fills a gap in the literature by investigating learners' sensitivity to the constraints on nominal phrases with ba (ba-NP) and verbal phrases with ba (ba-VP). An example of a ba-construction is given in (1), where the functional morpheme ba precedes the object, which, in turn, precedes the verb:
Historically, the functional morpheme ba was grammaticalized as an object marker from a verb in a serial construction. As a result, the object occurs preverbally, yielding the order subject-object-verb, which departs from the canonical subject-verb-object word order of Chinese. Apart from the change in word order, the noun in the ba-construction is subject to the definiteness constraint, and the verb has to be morphologically complex, co-occurring with a verbal complement or an aspect marker. These properties form the focus of the investigation in the L2 study.
A rich array of formal and functional analyses of ba in different theoretical frameworks is reviewed. Among these approaches, Liu's (1997) semantic-aspectual approach is singled out as offering a unified account for the constraints on both the ba-NP and the ba-VP by the notion of boundedness. This approach entails that “the acquisition of the Chinese aspect system is a precondition for the acquisition of the ba-construction” (p. 20), but the causal relationship is not addressed here and awaits further investigation. In particular, the intriguing relationship between the ba-construction and the acquisition of resultative verb complements (RVCs) and perfective aspect marker (le) calls for investigation in different acquisition contexts.
How do learners acquire the knowledge that the ba-NP has to be definite, generic, or specific and the ba-VP has to be complex—appearing with the perfective aspect marker le as in (1) or in the RVC construction?
A parallel theme of the work is the first language (L1)-L2 comparison, which is of interest to many acquisitionists who traverse both fields. Previous acquisition studies reviewed include three L1 studies and one SLA study. The commentary on each study's theoretical and methodological issues is informative.
Two experiments were conducted to tap learners' knowledge: a production task that elicited subjects' description of actions shown on video and a grammaticality judgment task that required subjects to give judgments on written sentences describing the video they saw in the production task. The highly controlled contents of the video scenes are a commendable feature of the methodology, and the use of video together with a grammaticality judgment task is a welcome and novel design, contextualizing the task and making the judgment of the sentences less artificial. However, some confounding factors made it difficult for the video to test the definiteness constraint.
Sixty-five subjects were divided into three proficiency groups based on the number of weeks they had been studying Chinese in the United States. Much effort went into designing specific dynamic pairs of actions on video, which have many advantages over static pictures for the purpose of eliciting the ba-construction. Scenes from the hand washing pair of actions are nicely illustrated in the volume. A special feature is that subjects were asked to indicate their confidence, or lack thereof, in categorical terms regarding their judgment. The use of confidence indicators in addition to subjects' grammaticality judgments reveals a fuller picture; for example, some high-proficiency subjects were confident about their nontarget judgments, reflecting, unequivocally, a lack of knowledge of the complexity constraint.
The results show both similarities and differences in error patterns in child and adult Chinese. Production of bare verbs in the ba-construction in violation of complexity constraint is an error found only in adult L2 Chinese, which suggests that the constraint is acquired early by children but not by some adult learners. The finding that learners were more confident judging ba-VPs with le than with RVC is attributed to the inherent syntactic and semantic complexity of the RVC relative to the simpler perfective aspect marker le.
Overall, the study enriches our understanding of the problems in the acquisition of Chinese ba-constructions, raising new issues for future investigation. Although a greater impact might have been achieved by linking the findings to general theoretical issues in the wider field of SLA, the pedagogical implications for the learning and teaching of Chinese should benefit practitioners in related fields.
