An Investigation of English-Speaking Students' Acquisition of Chinese Complements: From a Cognitive Linguistic Perspective

In the practice of teaching Chinese as a foreign language to English-speaking learners, the Chinese verb-complement structure is an important yet challenging linguistic form.As one of the basic Chinese syntactic constructions, the verb-complement structure, on the one hand, is widely used in written and spoken Mandarin Chinese; on the other hand, it is relatively complex, including different types, and has no equivalent in English.Adopting a cognitive linguistic perspective to investigate second language (L2) learners' application of Chinese verb-complement structures, this study examines 280 extracts of Chinese journals (free writing) composed by a group of lower-intermediate level L1 English students.Through analyzing factors impacting on L2 learners' usage of Chinese verb-complement structures, such as the type of complements, the position of complements, formal markers, this study finds that the difficulty of each category of Chinese complements varies; primarily, syntactic complexity as well as conceptual differences in event description between Chinese and English are the main causes of learners' errors.Based on these findings, this study provides pedagogical implications for teaching and learning Chinese as a foreign/second language.