Persistence of the implicit influence of NL: the case of the pseudo-passive

This paper re-examines the case of the 'pseudo-passive', an interlanguage structure considered to be typical of L1-Chinese learners of L2 English (Schachter and Rutherford 1979; Rutherford 1983; Yip and Matthews 1995). Earlier approaches to the analysis of the structure, i.e. typological (Schachter and Rutherford 1979; Rutherford 1983) and syntactic (Yip 1995; Yip and Matthews 1995), are reviewed and an alternative approach, i.e. discourse-syntactic, is proposed to bridge a methodological gap left from the earlier studies. this approach is subsequently adopted for analysing the structure found in a two-year longitudinal database consisting of the written data produced independently by two adult speakers of advanced L1-Chinese-L2 English interlanguage. The study shows that the pseudo-passive is driven by a topic-comment function and structure in the L1, which confirms the understanding reached by the earlier research. More importantly, however, it provides evidence that the 'pseudo-passive' is reincarnated into a target-like passive as a result of increased syntacticization, thereby showing the persistence of the L1 influence.