The Acquisition of the BA Construction by English-speaking Learners of Chinese

This study examined the acquisition of the BA construction by English-speaking learners of Chinese. The BA construction is a unique yet important grammar phenomenon in Chinese. Whether second language (L2) learners of Chinese are able to understand and use this construction correctly and appropriately may affect the overall success of their communication in the target language. Previous studies on the acquisition of the BA construction showed that L2 Chinese learners did better with certain types of BA sentences than with others. However, those studies are mainly descriptive in nature, without fitting themselves into the framework of any existing SLA theory. This study systematically examined L2 Chinese learners' knowledge of various linguistic properties of the BA construction within the framework of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2005; 2009), comparing the acquisition of core syntactic properties vs. properties at the interfaces of syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse. Specifically, this study examined whether L2 Chinese learners' acquisition of those properties differs in terms of the knowledge that each property requires, comparing core syntax properties with interface properties, as the IH predicts. Fifteen intermediate low and 17 intermediate high English-speaking learners of Chinese and 20 native speakers of Chinese completed three tasks: a grammaticality judgment task, a contextual acceptability preference task, and a paired grammaticality judgment task. Their responses were measured both in accuracy rates and acceptance rates. Repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted to compare the mean acceptance rates each group achieved across the properties and sentence types (grammatical vs. ungrammatical). Repeated measures ANOVAs were also conducted to compare the mean acceptance rates of each property across the groups. The results indicated that the native speakers consistently achieved high accuracy across properties although there was more variance with the syntax-discourse properties. Both L2 groups scored significantly higher with core syntax properties than with the interface properties. The IH was partially supported in this study, since an advantage over the core syntax properties was observed. The observed distinction provides instructional implications for the teaching of the BA construction to students of Chinese a foreign language, e.g. when presenting a construction like BA, a better and more effective way might be to distinguish the properties in terms of the knowledge they call for. Those that call for knowledge from other domains such as semantics or pragmatics other than syntax should be emphasized and more time and effort should be devoted to these properties. In practicing the BA construction, students should be provided with contexts in which this construction will be used appropriately and authentically

Chinese DE constructions in secondary predication: Historical and typological perspectives

This dissertation investigates the history of Chinese DE [tə] constructions in light of the typology of secondary predication. A secondary predicate, such as hot in He drank the tea hot, is a predicate that provides subsidiary information to a substructure (the participant tea) of the more salient primary event (drank). Mandarin DE features in two strategies: (i) a DE-marked primary event elaborated by a predicate following it, and (ii) a DE-marked secondary predicate preposed to the primary predicate. Focusing on Late Medieval Chinese (7th to mid-13th c.), the study examines the evolution of the DE-marked strategies from three distinctive constructions: resultative [V DE1 VP] by DE1 (得), nominal modification by DE2 (底/的), and secondary predication by DE3 (地). The first theme concerns the interactions between DE2-marked nominalization and DE3-marked secondary predicate constructions. Results show that DE2 and DE3 developed from opposite poles of the attribution vs. predication continuum, overlapping in categories intermediate between prototypical restrictive modification and secondary predication. Their distinctive information-packaging functions are consistently mapped to different construals of a property’s time-stability, which are reflected in their collocational preferences. The second theme of the study deals with the merger of DE1 and DE2 constructions and the creation of the [V DE Pred] topic-comment schema, where [V DE] represents an event as the topic, and Pred makes an assertion about a substructure of V. The discussion focuses on the structural and semantic changes of the [V DE1 VP] construction that facilitate its alignment with the DE2-marked topic-comment construction. The development of DE constructions mirrors semantic shifts between temporally anterior vs. simultaneous relations and conceptual fluidity between event- vs. participant-orientation, parameters that feature in the encoding of secondary predication crosslinguistically (Verkerk 2009, Himmelmann and Schultze-Berndt 2005, van der Auwera and Malchukov 2005, Loeb-Diehl 2005). The findings also suggest a reevaluation of the typology. Notably, semantic orientation is not crucial to whether a semantic relation is encoded by a DE construction, or which DE construction is selected. Instead, it is information-packaging functions, construals of time-stability, and iconic principles that play a dominant role

한국인 고등학생의 영어 형용사 타동결과구문 학습에서의 인공지능 챗봇 기반 교수의 효과

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 사범대학 외국어교육과(영어전공), 2022.2. 김기택.English adjectival transitive resultative constructions (VtR) are notoriously challenging for Korean L2 English learners due to their syntactic and semantic differences from their L1 counterparts. To deal with such a complex structure, like English adjectival VtR, Korean L2 English learners need instructional interventions, including explicit instructions and corrective feedback on the target structure. Human instructors are virtually incapable of offering adequate corrective feedback, as providing corrective feedback from a human teacher to hundreds of students requires excessive time and effort. To deal with the practicality problems faced by human instructors in providing corrective feedback, numerous artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have been developed to provide foreign language learners with corrective feedback on par with human teachers. Regrettably, many currently available AI chatbots remain underdeveloped. In addition, no prior research has been conducted to assess the effectiveness of corrective feedback offered by an AI chatbot, a human instructor, or additional explicit instruction via video material. The current study examined the instructional effects of corrective feedback from an AI chatbot on Korean high school students’ comprehension and production of adjectival VtR. Also, the current study investigated whether the corrective feedback generated by the AI chatbot enables Korean L2 English learners to expand their constructional repertoire beyond instructed adjectival VtR to uninstructed prepositional VtR. To investigate these issues, text-based Facebook Messenger AI chatbots were developed by the researcher. The effectiveness of the AI chatbots’ corrective feedback was compared with that of a human instructor and with additional video material. Students were divided into four groups: three instructional groups and one control group. The instructional groups included a chatbot group, a human group, and a video group. All learners in the three instructional groups watched a 5-minute explicit instruction video on the form and meaning pairings of the adjectival VtR in English. After that, learners were divided into three groups based on their preferences for instructional types. The learners volunteered to participate in the instructional procedures with corrective feedback from a text-based AI chatbot, a human instructor, or additional explicit instruction using a 15-minute video. Moreover, they took part in three testing sessions, which included a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest. The control group students were not instructed, and only participated in the three testing sessions. Two tasks were used for each test session: an acceptability judgment task (AJT) and an elicited writing task (EWT). The AJT tested participants’ comprehension of instructed adjectival VtR and uninstructed prepositional VtR. The EWT examined the correct production of instructed adjectival VtR and uninstructed prepositional VtR. The results of the AJT revealed that the instructional treatment (e.g., corrective feedback from the AI chatbot or a human instructor, or additional explicit instruction from the video material) was marginally more effective at improving the comprehension of adjectival VtR than was the case with the control group. On the other hand, the instructional treatment on the adjectival VtR failed in the generalization to prepositional VtR which was not overtly instructed. In the EWT, the participants in the corrective feedback groups (e.g., the chatbot and human groups) showed a more significant increase in the correct production of the instructed adjectival VtR more so than those in the video and control groups. Furthermore, the chatbot group learners showed significantly higher production of uninstructed prepositional VtR compared to any other group participants. These findings suggest that chatbot-based instruction can help Korean high school L2 English learners comprehend and produce complex linguistic structures—namely, adjectival and prepositional VtR. Moreover, the current study has major pedagogical implications for principled frameworks for implementing AI chatbot-based instruction in the context of foreign language learning.영어 형용사 타동결과구문(English Adjectival Transitive Resultative Construction)은 한국인 영어 학습자들에게 모국어의 대응 구문이 갖는 의미 통사론적 차이로 인해 학습하기 매우 어려운 것으로 알려져 있다. 따라서 영어 형용사 타동결과구문과 같은 복잡한 구문을 학습하기 위해서, 한국인 영어 학습자들에게는 목표 구조에 대한 명시적 교수와 교정적 피드백을 포함한 교수 처치가 요구된다. 수백 명의 학습자들에게 교정적 피드백을 제공하기 위해서는 과도한 시간과 노력이 요구되기 때문에, 인간 교사가 적절한 양의 교정적 피드백을 제공한다는 것은 사실상 불가능하다. 교정적 피드백을 제공할 때 직면하는 이러한 실용성 문제를 해결하기 위하여, 외국어 학습자들에게 인간 교사와 유사한 교정 피드백을 제공할 수 있는 수많은 인공 지능(AI) 챗봇이 개발되었다. 유감스럽게도, 현재 사용 가능한 많은 외국어 학습용 인공지능 챗봇은 아직 충분히 개발되지 않은 상태에 남아있으며, 인공지능 챗봇의 교정적 피드백이 갖는 교수효과를 비교 분석한 연구는 현재 이루어지지 않은 상태다. 이러한 선행연구의 한계에 초점을 두어, 본 연구에서는 인공지능 챗봇의 교정적 피드백이 한국 고등학생의 영어 형용사 타동결과구문의 이해와 생성에 미치는 교수 효과를 살펴보았다. 또한 본 연구에서는 이러한 교수 효과가 언어적으로 관련된 다른 영어 구문의 학습에도 영향을 끼치는지를 알아보기 위해 교실에서 직접 가르치지 않았던 구문인 영어 전치사 타동결과구문(English Prepositional Transitive Resultative Construction)의 학습 양상을 알아보았다. 이를 위해, 본 연구에서는 텍스트 메시지 기반의 페이스북 메신저에서 구동되는 인공지능 챗봇을 개발하였다. 인공지능 챗봇의 교수효과 검증을 위해 본 연구에 참여한 학생들은 네 개의 집단으로 구분되었다: 세 개의 교수 집단에는 교수처치가 적용되었고, 한 개의 통제 집단에서는 교수처치가 적용되지 않았다. 교수처치가 적용된 세 개의 집단은 챗봇그룹, 인간그룹, 영상그룹으로 분류되었으며, 이들은 모두 영어로 된 형용사 타동결과구문의 형태와 의미 쌍에 대한 5분 길이의 학습 비디오를 시청함으로써 명시적 교수 처치를 받았다. 또한 비디오를 시청한 후 세 그룹의 학습자들은 교재를 통해 제공되는 언어연습자료를 해결하는 과업에 참여하였다. 다음으로 세 집단(챗봇그룹, 인간그룹, 영상그룹)은 다음과 같은 추가적 교수처치를 받았다: 챗봇그룹 학습자들은 교재 활동과 관련된 텍스트 기반 인공지능 챗봇과의 대화에 참여함으로써 오류에 대한 교정적 피드백을 받았다. 인간그룹 학습자들은 교재활동을 완수한 내용을 인간 교사에게 전송하고, 이에 대한 교정적 피드백을 받았다. 영상그룹 학습자들은 교재활동을 완수한 후 이에 대한 15분의 추가적인 명시적 교수자료를 영상으로 시청하였다. 학습자의 교수효과는 사전시험, 사후시험 및 지연 사후시험으로 검증되었다. 한편 통제 집단 학생들은 교수처치 없이 세 번의 시험에만 참여하였다. 세 차례의 시험에서는 수용성판단과제(AJT)와 유도작문과제(EWT)의 두 가지 과제가 사용되었다. 수용성판단과제를 통하여, 교수된 영어 형용사 타동결과구문과 지시되지 않은 영어 전치사 타동결과구문 대한 참가자의 이해도를 측정하였다. 유도작문과제를 통하여 교수된 영어 형용사 타동결과구문과 지시되지 않은 영어 전치사 타동결과구문을 참여자가 정확하게 산출할 수 있는지를 측정하였다. 시험의 결과는 다음과 같았다. 수용성판단과제의 경우, 교수처치가 적용된 세 집단이 통제 집단보다 형용사 타동결과구문의 이해도 향상에 약간 더 효과적인 것으로 나타났다. 하지만 형용사 타동결과구문에 대한 교수적처치는 교수되지 않은 전치사 타동결과구문으로의 학습에 영향을 주지 못하였다. 유도작문과제의 경우, 인공지능 챗봇이나 인간 교사에 의해 제공되는 교정 피드백 그룹의 참가자가 영상그룹 및 통제집단의 참가자보다 형용사 타동결과구문의 올바른 생성에 더 유의미한 영향을 미치는 것으로 드러났다. 동일한 교수 효과가 전치사 타동결과구문의 학습에서도 관측되어, 형용사 타동결과구문의 학습이 전치사 타동결과구문의 학습에 일반화가 일어났다. 본 연구는 인간 교사가 직면해야 하는 실용성 문제를 극복하고, 인공지능 챗봇이 한국인 고등학교 L2 영어 학습자가 형용사 및 전치사 타동결과구문과 같은 복잡한 언어 구조를 이해하고 생성하는 데에 인간 교사와 비견될 정도로 교정적 피드백을 제공할 수 있을 것임을 시사한다. 또한, 본 연구는 인공지능 챗봇 기반 외국어 교육의 실제적 사례 및 효과를 선도적으로 보여주었다는 점에서 의미가 있다.ABSTRACT i TABLE OF CONTENTS iii LIST OF TABLES v LIST OF FIGURES vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1 1.1. Statement of Problems and Objectives 1 1.2. Scope of the Research 6 1.3. Research Questions 9 1.4. Organization of the Dissertation 10 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW 12 2.1. Syntactic and Semantic Analysis of Korean and English Transitive Resultative Constructions 13 2.1.1. Syntactic Analysis of English Transitive Resultative Construction 13 2.1.2. Syntactic Analysis of Korean Transitive Resultative Constructions 25 2.1.3. Semantic Differences in VtR between Korean and English 46 2.1.4. Previous acquisition study on English adjectival and prepositional VtR 54 2.2. Corrective Feedback 59 2.2.1. Definition of Corrective Feedback 59 2.2.2. Types of Corrective Feedback 61 2.2.3. Noticeability in Corrective Feedback 67 2.2.4. Corrective Recast as a Stepwise Corrective Feedback 69 2.3. The AI Chatbot in Foreign Language Learning 72 2.3.1. Non-communicative Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) 73 2.3.2. AI Chatbot without Corrective Feedback 79 2.3.3. AI Chatbot with Corrective Feedback 86 2.4. Summary of the Literature Review 92 CHAPTER 3. METHODOLOGY 98 3.1. Participants 98 3.2. Target Structure 102 3.3. Procedure of the Study 106 3.4. Instructional Material Shared by the Experimental Group 107 3.4.1. General Framework of the Instructional Session 108 3.4.2. Instructional Material Shared by Experimental Groups 111 3.5. Group-specific Instructional Treatments: Post-Written Instructional Material Activities on Corrective Feedback from Chatbot, Human, and Additional Explicit Instruction via Video 121 3.5.1. Corrective Feedback from the AI Chatbot 122 3.5.2. Corrective Feedback from a Human Instructor 136 3.5.3. Additional Instruction via Video Material 139 3.6. Test 142 3.6.1. Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) 144 3.6.2. Elicited Writing Task (EWT) 150 3.7. Statistical Analysis 152 CHAPTER 4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 154 4.1. Results of Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) 154 4.1.1. AJT Results of Instructed Adjectival VtR 155 4.1.2. AJT Results of Uninstructed Prepositional VtR 160 4.1.3. Discussion 164 4.2. Results of Elicited Writing Task (EWT) 175 4.2.1. EWT Results for Instructed Adjectival VtR 176 4.2.2. EWT Results of Uninstructed Prepositional VtR 181 4.2.3. Further Analysis 187 4.2.4. Discussion 199 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION 205 5.1. Summary of the Findings and Implications 205 5.2. Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research 213 REFERENCES 217 APPENDICES 246 ABSTRACT IN KOREAN 297박

Syntax of Vietnamese Aspect

The aim of this thesis is two-fold: to develop an articulated Vietnamese clause structure in two syntactic domains: VP-external and VP-internal in the spirit of generative grammar, and to see how this functional architecture is supported empirically from the perspective of second language acquisition. To address theoretical issues, on the one hand, it brings together interesting semantic and syntactic contrasts of aspectual morphemes in Vietnamese, i.e., the distributional and interpretative independence of Vietnamese tense and aspect as well as the way they interact with other syntactic phenomenon such as negation, quantification and definiteness. On the other hand, it reveals to what extent the mechanisms that Vietnamese recruits to encode aspect are different from those employed in Indo- European languages and other areally-related languages, especially including Chinese. Based on a detailed semantic-syntactic investigation of Vietnamese aspect, the thesis sets out the properties that need to be acquired by Chinese learners. It distinguishes between those properties which are acquirable without difficulties and those that are ‘problematic’ in order to verify the proposed Vietnamese functional clause. It also sets out to validate some recent hypotheses in the realm of second language acquisition. The thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical approach of the thesis. Chapter 2 systematically reviews a set of semantic and syntactic studies on aspect that are relevant to the discussion. Chapter 3 lays out previous research on Vietnamese tense and aspect as points of departure for my proposals. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to an analysis of how tense and aspect are realized in Vietnamese both pre- and post-verbally. Chapter 6 provides a brief comparison between Vietnamese and Chinese aspectual systems, focusing on the particular properties investigated in the following chapter. Chapter 7 presents a set of experiments examining Chinese learners’ acquisition of Vietnamese aspect-related constructions, these shed light on current generativist hypotheses about second language acquisition. Chapter 8 concludes the thesis

Je dood vervelen of je te pletter amuseren? Het intensiverende gebruik van de pseudoreflexieve resultatiefconstructie in hedendaags Belgisch en Nederlands Nederlands

This paper focuses on the intensifying use of the fake reflexive resultative construction, as demonstrated in the example Hij lacht zich een breuk om die mop (lit. ‘He laughs himself a fracture because of that joke’). Although the literal use of the (English) fake reflexive resultative construction has been the subject of several studies, scant attention has been paid to the potential of this construction for conveying an intensifying meaning, though these intensifying uses show an intriguing mix of productivity and lexical idiosyncrasy that deserves careful analysis. This case study will zoom in on the use of the intensifying fake reflexive resultative construction in present-day Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch. The analysis will reveal some discrepancies between two national variants of Dutch and shed light on the development of subschemas displaying various degrees of productivity on the one hand and the possible lexicalisation of strong combinations on the other

THE SYNTAX OF LE IN MANDARIN CHINESE

PhDThis thesis focuses on the syntax of the structures with the particle le in Mandarin Chinese. The particle le has two uses: verbal le and sentential le. I will argue the verbal le in Mandarin has a dual function: it is used primarily as a quantity marker and secondarily as a perfectivity marker. This leads to a result that most of the cases with le are both telic and perfective. Others, with the lack of (im)perfectivity, only extend a quantity reading. Meanwhile, I assume the perfective reading in Mandarin solely depends on verbal le, except in negative and interrogative situations. This means in a sentence with a perfective viewpoint, even if le occurs after the object at the end of the clause, it should also be a verbal le. I argue that such a structure is result of VP-fronting. On the other hand, a real sentential le is not directly related to perfectivity. I propose that sentential le is a focus marker that scopes high in the hierarchy and yields flexible readings depending on which structure enters the focus domain under different contexts. In this sense, the configuration with both verbal and sentential le extends an assertion of a perfective event, which, I propose, functionally corresponds to the perfect aspect in English. In short, although there are two uses of the particle le in Mandarin, they should be distinguished by their grammatical functions instead of their linear positions.China Scholarship Council

THE COMPUTATION OF VERB-ARGUMENT RELATIONS IN ONLINE SENTENCE COMPREHENSION

Understanding how verbs are related to their arguments in real time is critical to building a theory of online language comprehension. This dissertation investigates the incremental processing of verb-argument relations with three interrelated approaches that use the event-related potential (ERP) methodology. First, although previous studies on verb-argument computations have mainly focused on relating nouns to simple events denoted by a simple verb, here I show by investigating compound verbs I can dissociate the timing of the subcomputations involved in argument role assignment. A set of ERP experiments in Mandarin comparing the processing of resultative compounds (Kid bit-broke lip: the kid bit his lip such that it broke) and coordinate compounds (Store owner hit-scolded employee: the store owner hit and scolded an employee) provides evidence for processing delays associated with verbs instantiating the causality relation (breaking-BY-biting) relative to the coordinate relation (hitting-AND-scolding). Second, I develop an extension of classic ERP work on the detection of argument role-reversals (the millionaire that the servant fired) that allows me to determine the temporal stages by which argument relations are computed, from argument identification to thematic roles. Our evidence supports a three-stage model where an initial word association stage is followed by a second stage where arguments of a verb are identified, and only at a later stage does the parser start to consider argument roles. Lastly, I investigate the extent to which native language (L1) subcategorization knowledge can interfere with second language (L2) processing of verb-argument relations, by examining the ERP responses to sentences with verbs that have mismatched subcategorization constraints in L1 Mandarin and L2 English (“My sister listened the music”). The results support my hypothesis that L1 subcategorization knowledge is difficult for L2 speakers to override online, as they show some sensitivity to subcategorization violations in offline responses but not in ERPs. These data indicate that computing verb-argument relations requires accessing lexical syntax, which is vulnerable to L1 interference in L2. Together, these three ERP studies allow us to begin to put together a full model of the sub-processes by which verb-argument relations are constructed in real time in L1 and L2