L2 Acquisition of Chinese Locative Inversion

Locative inversion is a non-canonical structure in Chinese and English. According to the Contrastive Analysis theory (Lado, 1957), a structure in L2 is easier to learn if it has the same meaning and distribution as an “equivalent” in L1. Previous studies suggest that English-speaking Chinese L2 learners would have no difficulty in acquiring the unmarked construction (Jin, 2008). The present study investigates how well CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) learners acquire locative inversion in Chinese and whether or not the positive L1 transfer occurs. The data comes from high-intermediate and advanced CFL learners. It consists of two parts guided picture description and grammaticality judgments. Results from the two tasks show that the CFL learners did not have a good handle of locative inversion despite the existence of a similar construction in their L1. The CFL learners’ L1 did not help in their acquisition of Chinese locative inversion.