Chinese Speakers’ Acquisition of English Conditionals: Acquisition Order and L1 Transfer Effects

This study examines how the syntactic complexity of English conditionals and first language transfer influence Chinese ESL learners’ acquisition order of conditionals. The differences in English and Chinese conditional constructions are presented in the paper. Brown’s (1973) Cumulative Complexity principle is employed to determine the syntactic complexity of six conditionals: present factual, past factual, future predictive, present counterfactual, past counterfactual, and mixed-time-reference counterfactual conditional. O’Grady’s (1997) Developmental Law is used as the theoretical framework for predicting the acquisition orders of the if-clause and the main clause of English conditionals. A written cloze test simulating oral conversations is used to elicit the production of English conditionals from 20 native-speakers of English and 36 adult Chinese speakers, and the answers from both groups are compared. The results of Chinese participants’ production did not support the predicted acquisition orders in the research hypotheses. Nor could the implicational scaling of acquisition order be established due to the low reproducibility. The results of a two-way repeated-measures ANOVA show an interaction of the conditional type and clause type factors. Moreover, systematic variations in the learners’ production provide evidence of L1 transfer effects, such as an over-production of certain forms, and a preference for smallest rule changes in the passage from one developmental stage to the next one. It is important to be aware of how these L1 transfer effects interact with the syntactic complexity factor in Chinese participants’ production of English conditionals, so better instruction of English conditionals can be achieved. Conditional constructions reflect the human capacity to contemplate various situations and to infer consequences on the basis of known or imaginary conditions. Linguists doing descriptive studies have assumed that every human language has a method of forming conditional sentences, and they have found that conditionals do exist in many languages, such as Classic Greek, English, German, Latin, Chinese, and others (Traugott, Meulen, Reilly, & Ferguson, 1986). However, Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) reported that learners of English as a second language (ESL) have difficulties in acquiring English conditionals due to the syntactic and semantic complexities embedded in conditional constructions. Second Language Studies, 19(1), Fall 2000, pp. 57-98. Chou – Chinese Speakers’ Acquisition of English Conditionals 58 Some researchers believe that the understanding of the human mechanism of constructing and comprehending conditionals “provides basic insights into the cognitive processes, linguistic competence, and inferential strategies of human beings” (Traugott et al., 1986, p. 3). The aim of this paper is to investigate English as a Second Language (ESL) learners’ development of linguistic competence in terms of their acquisition of English conditionals. I hope the findings can suggest implications for ESL instruction of conditionals. I will begin with a cross-linguistic analysis of conditionals in English and Chinese, which differ greatly from each other in linguistic representation. The typical English conditional construction is if p, then q (Traugott et al., 1986). The if-clause (IF-C) is the antecedent, in which the speaker states the condition of reasoning, and the then-clause is the consequent in which a speaker states the outcome of inferences (Traugott et al., 1986, p. 5). The word then can be omitted without distorting the meaning of a conditional sentence, so I will use the term main clause (MC) to refer to the consequent of a conditional. In English conditionals, the time of events (i.e., in the past, present, or future) and the truth-value (i.e., factual, possible, counterfactual) of reference are represented explicitly by the following three grammatical features of the verb phrases (VP) in both the IF-C and the MC: (a) the past tense form, (b) the perfect aspect form, and (c) the existence of modals, such as will, may, or can. In this paper, I use [± past], [± perfect], and [± modal] to represent these grammatical features. The preceding + or – markers symbolize the existence or absence of the features in the verb phrases. Table 1 shows a frequency ranking of the VPs in eight types of conditional patterns, coded for the three grammatical features. These eight conditional types, reported to appear most frequently in English, are presented in the ranking of their frequency in speech from the highest to the lowest (Hwang, 1979, cited in Celce-Murcia & LarsenFreeman, 1999, p. 557). Hwang (1979) analyzed English writing (357,249 words) and speech (63,746 words) that represented various discourse types. She found that among the 70 conditional tense-modal patterns that naturally occurred in writing and speech, the first seven types in Table 1 (A-G) made up two-thirds of all conditional sentences in her corpora. Chou – Chinese Speakers’ Acquisition of English Conditionals 59 Table 1 The Frequency Ranking of Conditional Sentence Types in Hwang’s (1979) Corpus Research Conditional structure Terminology Grammatical features of VP in IF-C and MC A. If +present tense, present tense. Generic factual If [−past]..., [past]... B. If + present tense., will/be going to present tense. Future (predictive) If [−past]...,