On March 13th, I very much enjoyed a talk given by Boping Yuan as part of the Cambridge University Linguistics Forum. He’s been researching Chinese speakers’ L2 English grammars. The information about the Chinese speakers’ grammar was interesting in itself and also led to an intriguing discussion in general terms about L2 grammars. Boping Yuan’s empirical study investigated Chinese speakers’ L2 acquisition of English “wh-on-earth” questions.
His results indicated that Chinese speakers of English can learn and store various wh-on-earth forms in apparently native-like ways, but without in fact being endowed with fully elaborated features. The interesting point in all this is, what kind of answer you would expect to the question, ‘Who on earth would buy that house?’ For native speakers of English, such questions are marked for a negative response. You might term them, perhaps, rhetorical questions. The person who asks this question is really focusing on the fact that the house is very overpriced or in a terrible condition or location. Apparently, the Chinese translation of this sentence does not carry the same negative marking, so it’s perfectly OK, from a Chinese point of view, to reply ‘Peter would.’ Boping Yuan stressed that it’s therefore very difficult for Chinese speakers of English to pick up this salient feature and cheerily admitted that it had taken him over 20 years to do so.
He referred to features being ‘dormant’. By this, he meant that they haven’t been activated but they have the capacity to be woken up, so it is possible that a Chinese speaker of English will eventually notice the negative marking of the wh-on-earth questions. There was a lot of discussion about the idea of features being dormant. He prefers ‘dormant’ to ‘inert’ because of the possibility of recovery. He was using this idea as a counter-point to Larry Selinker who advocated the concept of fossilisation, which sounds irredeemable.
I was taught by Larry Selinker for some years in the 1990s and at the time, as I recall, he was focusing on L2 speakers’ apparent failure to notice things that perhaps seemed much more blatant as evidence than the quite elusive evidence that Boping Yuan’s Chinese speakers were failing to notice in his study. So, for example, the above reply ‘Peter would’: this might be delivered as the excessive ‘Peter would buy the house’ or various attempts at deletion, such as ‘Peter would buy’ or ‘Peter would it’. What I remember Larry arguing was that, if a learner is exposed to plenteous correct examples but persists in producing partial examples themselves, then you have the concept of interlanguage. One of the key characteristics of interlanguage is fossilisation.
So, in some ways, Boping Yuan’s talk seemed very positive in that it offered the hope, potentially, of L2 learners achieving native-like proficiency in very large numbers.
Language Testing 123: Blog 