acquiring the passive voice: online production of the english passive construction by mandarin...

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ACQUIRING THE PASSIVE VOICE:ONLINEPRODUCTION OF THE ENGLISH PASSIVE

CONSTRUCTION BY MANDARIN SPEAKERS1

KENNY WANG

Abstract

The study utilises Processability Theory (PT; Pienemann 1998) and itsextension, the Unmarked Alignment Hypothesis (Pienemann, Di Biase, &Kawaguchi 2005) and the Lexical Mapping Hypothesis (Pienemann et al.2005; Kawaguchi & Di Biase 2005) as the language developmentframework to investigate the acquisition of the English passiveconstruction by Mandarin learners of English as a second language (ESL):The two hypotheses predict that second language (L2) learners initiallymap the most prominent argument role (the agent) onto the grammaticalsubject to produce L2 in the active voice; as the learners L2 develops,they then learn to attribute prominence to the semantic patient to producethe passive construction. Six native Mandarin speakers of three differentESL proficiency levels (early intermediate, late intermediate, advanced)participated in a cross-sectional study where informants were shown acomputer animation clip, the Fish Film (Tomlin 1995, 1997), which hasbeen demonstrated to successfully elicit the English passive constructionfrom native English speakers. The study found that the lower levellearners consistently could not implement the instructional and contextualcues and persisted in using the active construction throughout the entiretask; the late intermediate learner in the study was able to employ analternative strategy which although was constrained by the processingcapacity of the learner neverthelss preserved and conveyed the discourse-pragmatic focus of the event. The advanced learners of the studyperformed comparable to the native speaker control. The results areinterpreted as supporting the two PT-based hypotheses, which predict thatearly learners will cling on to the canonical mapping of Agent-Action-Patient to SVO and that they will not have the necessary processing

1 I wish to thank Bruno Di Biase, Satomi Kawaguchi and Michael Tyler for theirhelpful comments and advice on an earlier draft of this chapter.


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Acquiring the Passive Voice: Online Production of the English Passive96

resources to handle structures which deviate from the canonical semanticrole to grammatical function alignment.

1. IntroductionIn order for L2 learners to communicate effectively in L2, they must notonly comply with the L2 grammatical rules, they must also be able toaccurately capture and convey the focus and emphasis of a proposition inL2. The study of cross-linguistic pragmatics concerns itself with the aspectof L2 pragmatic competence by learners (Wierzbicka 2003, 2006). Syntaxhas traditionally been studied extensively by L2 learners throughconventional methods such as grammar translation. There is, however, anoverlap of these two traditions which has not been given the attention itdeserves in second language acquisition (SLA), namely the discourse-pragmatic competence in L2. Discourse-pragmatics refers to theknowledge that speakers bring to bear in deciding whether a syntacticstructure can be fit to a developing discourse (Cowan 1995:29).

When native or proficient speakers of English wish to describe anevent, there are a number of different ways for the speakers to express thesame proposition. For example, in describing an event where a policemanarrested a shoplifter, native English speakers may choose from, amongothers, the following truth-conditionally equivalent alternatives:

(1) The policeman arrested the shoplifter.(2) The shoplifter was arrested by the policeman.

Stylistic considerations aside, both structures express essentially the sameproposition. In deciding which voice to express the proposition, nativeEnglish speakers would take into consideration the discourse-pragmaticneeds of the particular communicative setting and choose the the most

appropriate construction to convey the content while at the same timefulfill such discourse-pragmatic needs.Syntax is one of the means which speakers explore in attempting

to focus, direct and tantalise the listeners attention (Slobin 1979:64).Likewise, Labov (1990:45) also pointed out from a functionalistperspective that on the whole grammar is not a tool of logical analysis;grammar is busy with emphasis, focus, down-shifting, and up-grading; it isa way of organizing information and taking alternative points of view.However, only proficient speakers of a language may fully utilise syntaxin such a functional capacity. The function of the passive voice in English


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Kenny Wang 97

is to defocus the agent and attribute prominence to the patient (Givn 1979,1984; Shibatani 1985). It has been observed in first language acquisition(FLA) that English speaking children acquire and master the passive voicerelatively late, particularly the full passive construction including theagential by clause (Pienemann et al. 2005). In other words, Englishspeaking children initally rely on the default word order and the active

voice to comprehend and express propositions, giving little regard todiscourse-pragmatics.The situation is less clear with adult L2 learners where learners

by definition are discourse-pragmatically competent speakers of their L1already, and particularly so where the passive construction exists andfunctions comparatively in their L1 as in the L2. The successfulacquisition of the passive constructions in an L2 like English where thepassive construction is a common and regular discourse feature is animportant milestone in learners L2 development. This aspect ofpragmatics, that is, the interactions between learners choice of L2 syntaxand the intended pragmatic thrust of their proposition (cf. Green 2005) isan area in SLA that deserves further investigation. The objective of thisstudy is to investigate the acquisition of the English passive construction

by Mandarin L1 learners of English L2. This study will anwer thefollowing research question:

Question: When subjected to compelling pragmatic contexts thatincline native speakers to promote the patient to the grammatical subject toproduce passive constructions, do ESL learners likewise produce passiveconstructions as favoured by the pragmatic contexts?

This paper will present prelimiary data showing that ashypothesised by the Processability Theory extension (Pienemann 1998;Pienemann et al. 2005), lower level L2 learners do not have the ability toproduce English passive constructions spontaneously because they lackthe necessary procesing resources to handle the passive construction.

The rest of the paper is organised as follows: section 2 presentsthe development of the English passive construction in First LanguageAcquisition. Section 3 considers factors that would trigger the use ofpassives. Section 4 introduces the Processability Theory and its newhypotheses (Pienemann et al. 2005). Section 5 and 6 introduce anempirical study investigating the Mandarin L1 learners of ESLsacquisition of the English passive construction in their L2 developmentand outline the research hypotheses and research design respectively.


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Finally, the results of the study are given in section 7, followed by theconclusion and the implications of the study in section 8.

2. Development of Passives in FLAIn terms of comprehension, it was found that English speaking childrenprior to age 4 consistently interpret strings ofNoun-Verb-Noun sentencesas Actor-Action-Undergoer(Bever 1970). Bever (1970) found that whenchildren were asked to act out, for instance, the sentence the cow iskissed by the horse, 4-year-old children tended to interpret the first noun,ie. the cow, as the kisser, hence reversing the meaning of the sentence.Bevers (1970) experiment was replicated by Maratsos (1974), whosefinding confirmed Bevers original observation. Moreover, de Villiers andde Villiers (1973) also modeled after Bevers (1970) study but used theinformants mean length of utterance (MLU) instead of the chronologicalage as the performance predictor. The results of their study, again, echoedthose of Bevers.

In terms of production, when English speaking children doproduce passives, they tend to produce truncated passives; full passives arerare in childrens speech production (Beilin & Sack 1975; Horgan 1976;Borer & Wexler 1987, 1992). For example, Harwood (1959) found no fullpassives in his corpus of approximately 12,700 utterances consisting ofapproximately 99,000 running words by children between the ages of 4;11to 5;8. More recently, in a corpus study examining the development ofpassive participles in seven corpora of childrens spontaneous speech,Israel, Johnson and Brooks (2000) found that children first develop theambiguous truncated passives, which may have a stative (adjectival)reading or a passive (verbal) reading (see Cook 1990). Furthermore, notonly are full passives rare in childrens spontaneous speech, the scarcitycontinues into adulthood. Xiao, McEnery and Qians (2006) corpus-basedanalysis of both spoken and written British English by adults revealed thattruncated be-passives make up 89.2% of the total written be-passives and94.9% of the total spoken be-passives, while truncated get-passives makeup 91.5% of the total written get-passives and 97.4% of the total spokenget-passives. The scarcity of full passives in adult speech consequentlymeans that children are exposed to a very limited and infrequent linguisticinput for this construction (Brown 1973).

Marchman, Bates, Burkardt and Good (1991) conducted twoexperiments with children between 3 to 11 years old in an attempt to findout what children would do instead when they do not respond to probes tothe patient of an event. In their study, the patient in an event was probed


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Kenny Wang 99

by the experimenter in the form of Tell me about the (undergoer) or inother similar forms. It was found that when children did not producepassives in these circumstances, they employed the following tworesponse types (Marchman et al. 1991:80-81):

1. Actor Actives: Actives where the actor of the action is in subject

position.e.g., the bear is licking the tiger.

2. Non-Passives: Event or Non-event descriptions in which theprobed character is topicalised. This category is comprised offour types of responses:

(a) Non-Event Descriptions with the undergoer/location insubject position:

e.g., the tiger is just sitting there.(b) Event Descriptions with the undergoer/location in subjectposition:

e.g., the tiger let the bear lick him.

(c) Two Clause constructions:e.g., the tiger is just sitting there and the bear lickshim.(d) Cleft constructions:

e.g., it was the tiger that the bear licked.

In those instances where children did not choose to use passives,they would often utilise alternative constructions that fulfiled the samegeneral discourse function as the passive. In other words, these alternativeconstructions provide children with a legal way to use easier andpreviously mastered constructions (i.e. the active voice) and still solve thediscourse problem to topicalize the undergoer in the scene. (Marchman etal. 1991:88-89). Interestingly, Qi (1996) also reported a similar

observation of alternative strategies in Mandarin among some of thesecond graders in her study of monolingual Mandarin speaking children.

In summary, the literature in FLA has shown that the Englishpassive constructions are comprehended more poorly and acquired muchlater than their active counterpart by native English speaking children. Ithas been suggested that English speaking children do not have full controlof the full passives until 7 years of age (Horgan 1978). When children donot produce passives, they tend to utilise alternative strategies thatpreserve the same discourse-pragmatic function as passives.


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3. Motivations for PassivesSpeakers are always faced with different choices of syntactic forms, andthey are free to make their choice in terms of how to express theirintention. The factors that influence the speakers choice to favour thepassive over the active construction are varied. One of such factors is the

establishment of discourse topicality. A general definition of the notion ofdiscourse topic is the proposition (or a set of propositions) about whichthe speaker is either providing or requesting new information (Ochs-Keenan & Schieffelin 1983:68). Patient-focused questions such as Whatis being done to (the patient)? and What is happening to (the patient)?have been found to be effective in eliciting responses in the passive voicefrom primary and secondary school aged children (Carroll 1958; Turner &Rommetveit 1967). The patient may also be framed as the discourse topicthrough non-linguistic means such as physically pointing something outwith ones finger (Ochs-Keenan & Schieffelin 1983).

The pragmatic presupposition also affects the syntactic structuresemployed. Bock (1977:723) hypothesised that alternative surfacestructures are used differentially in order to array the information in

sentences with given information preceding new information. Bock foundthat when the semantic patient was the given information or thepragmatically presupposed information, it was more likely to precede thesemantic agent, resulting in the interlocuter producing the passiveconstruction.

Moreover, the conceptual accessibility of the nouns has beenclaimed to exert influence on the syntactic array of the nouns in a sentence(Bock & Warren 1985). Bock and Warren found that the conceptuallymore accessible entity, which in their study was meansured by theimaginability of the noun, was more likely to appear early in a sentence.For example, the doctor in The doctor administered a shock was moreimaginable than the shock, it was therefore more conceptuallyaccessibile and more likely to appear first in a sentence, resulting in theactive construction. If the conceptual accessbility of the semantic patientwas higher than the agent, the passive construction was more likely tooccur.

The relative thematicity has also been hypothesised as thepredictor of grammatical voice in narratives (Tomlin 1983). It was foundthat the more thematic an entity of an event is, the more likley it wouldoccupy the subject position in a sentence. Tomlin drew support for hishypothesis based on the analyses of corpus data consisting of ice hockeygame commentaries. It was concluded that the grammatical subject in


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Kenny Wang 101

English is used primarily to encode thematic information, and secondarilyto encode agency.

Finally, while the core notions of topicality and thematicity havebeen offered as motivations for the passive construction, Tomlin in hislater works (Tomlin 1995, 1997) pointed out that such notions are vagueand subjective. In order to pin the vague notions of topicality and

thematicity down to something more concrete and empiricallymanipulable, Tomlin contended replacing the pragmatic notions ofthematicity and topicality with the cognitive counterpart of visualattention. Using a computer animation called Fish Film, Tomlin foundthat the entity that entered the speakers visual attention at the moment ofspeech generation was realised as the sentential subject. In other words, ifthe semantic patient was the visually attended entity as speakers producedthe sentence spontaneously, that entity would occupy the grammaticalsubject postion, resulting in a passive sentence. Tomlin was able toachieve over 90% accuracy rate with his native English speakinginformants, which was far greater than previous experiments involving themanipulations of less tangible variables such as theme, topicality,conceptual accessibility, saliency, animacy.

In summary, psycholinguistic studies on the triggers for the passivealternation in English have indicated that the privilege of sententialprimacy may be reserved for the most prominent entity, where prominencemay be attributed cognitively due to various motivations, including therelative topicality, thematicity, presuppositionality, saliency and animacyof the entities, as well as the speakers perspective-taking, empathy, visualattention, etc.

4. Processability Theory Extension and Its HypothesesProcessability Theory (Pienemann 1998) explains L2 morphosyntacticdevelopment in terms of the architecture of the human language processorand other human psychological constraints such as how lexical accessoccurs and how working memory constraints L2 production. It offers auniversal framework that can be used to predict the developmental pathsof L2s of any typology. PT is based on Levelts (1989) speech productionmodel, particularly the conceptualiser and the formulator components ofthe model. It strived to provide an explanation to account for the L2developmental patterns based on a psychologically plausible speechprocessing model. The main thrust of PT is that at any state ofdevelopment, the learner can produce and comprehend only those L2linguistic forms that the current state of the language processor can


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handle. (Pienemann 2007:137). PT hypothesises that in second languageacquisition, learners acquire L2 morphological and syntacticalconstructions in a predictable and verifiable order. PT hypothesises thatthe L2 learners language processing procedures form a hierarchical set ofstrata in which the acquisition of the lower level procedure is theprerequisite for acquiring the next procedure up the strata (Pienemann

1998). PT is a universal theory of SLA that has been tested against severaltypologically different L2s such as Swedish (Pienemann & Hkansson1999), Italian (Di Biase 2002; Di Biase & Kawaguchi 2002; Kawaguchi &Di Biase 2005), Arabic (Mansouri 1997, 2002, 2005), Japanese(Kawaguchi 2005), and Chinese (Gao 2005, Zhang 2004).

PT adopts Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG; Bresnan 2001) asits grammatical formalism (Pienemann 1998). LFG is a lexical feature-unification based theory of grammar. It offers a lexically drivengrammatical process of explaining speakers linguistic knowledge that ispsychologically compatible to the architecture of the human languageprocessor. It is for this reason that PT chooses LFG as its grammaticalformalism.

The underlying assumption of PT is the psychological constraints

on the L2 learners ability to process language output. PT hypothesises auniversal hierarchy of L2 development. The implicational developmentalhierarchy consists of the following procedures in the respective order:lemma acces > category procedure > intra-phrasal procedure > inter-phrasal procedure > inter-clausal procedure. As L2 learners become moreproficient with a language processing procedure, tasks involving it becomeless psychologically demanding for learners and more automatised, thusfreeing up the learners processing concentration allowing them topossibly move on to acquiring the next procedure up the hierarchy.

The original PT proposed in 1998 was to explain learners L2morphosyntactic development. Three PT-based hypotheses have recentlybeen put forth to extend PT beyond its scope of developmental stages ofmorphological-syntactical constructions. The PT extension seeks to

account for learners structural choices as reflections of their L2development of the syntactactic-pragmatic interface (Pienemann et al.2005). We shall consider only two of these hypotheses in this study,namely the Unmarked Alignment Hypothesis (UAH) and the LexicalMapping Hypothesis (LMH), as only these two are relevant to the active-passive alternation.


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Many researchers (e.g. Jackendoff 1972; Foley & Van Valin1984; Givn 1984; Bresnan 2001) have suggested a universal hierarchy ofsemantic roles as in (3):

(3) Thematic hierarchy (Bresnan 2001:307)Agent > Beneficiary > Experiencer/Goal > Instrument > Patient/Theme >

Locative

Moreover, grammatical functions also have a hierarchical relationshipaccording to their prominence, as in (4): All core functions are moreprominent than noncore functions:

(4) Relational hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie 1977; Bresnan 2001:96)core noncore

SUBJ > OBJ > OBJ > OBL > COMPL > ADJUNCT

(OBJ refers to secondary object)

UAH explains how learners by default integrate the top element from eachof these two hierarchies as the point of departure of their L2 syntax.

The Unmarked Aligned Hypothesis states that:In second language acquisition learners will initially organise syntax bymapping the most prominent semantic role available onto the subject (i.e.the most prominent grammatical role): The structural expression of thesubject, in turn, will occupy the most prominent linear position in c-structure, namely the initial position. (Pienemann et al. 2005).

Essentailly, UAH claims that learners structural choices are initiallyconstrained to one that involves unmarked or canonical mapping due tothe limited amount of processing resources available to the learners. The

unmarked alignment is illustrated in (5) for the sentence Peter pats a dog(from Kawaguchi 2007).


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(5) pat agent

subject

Peter

Patient

Object

a dog

a-structure (argument roles)

f-structure (grammatical functions)

c-structure (word order)

The one-to-one linear correspondence of semantic roles, grammaticalfunctions and c-structure positions produces an optimal alighment in linewith the Optimal Syntax (OT-LFG) notion of harmonic alignment(Prince & Smolensky 2004).

On the basis of this optimal alignment, LMH narrows the scopedown to the mappings of semantic roles onto grammatical functions.

The Lexical Mapping Hypothesis states that:L2 learners initially map the most prominent onto SUBJ and graduallylearn how to attribute prominence to a particular thematic role, e.g.,

promoting the patient (rather than the agent) role to SUBJ, first in singleclauses such as in Passive constructions and later in complex predicatessuch as Causative constructions. (Kawaguchi & Di Biase 2005)

The canonical mapping of argument roles to grammatical functionsrequires the least amount of processing resources (Pinker 1984). Therefore,when learners have accumulated a number of L2 lexical items and areready to string words together to produce multi-word utterances, they willinitially cling on to the canonical mapping of the target language. In thecase of English, UAH predicts that English L2 learners will, regardless oftheir L1, produce SVO, where the subject position is occupied by thesemantic agent. LMH predicts that learners will only be able todifferentiate the notions of agent and subject and manipulate the mapping

of non-agent roles to subject much later in their L2 development, sincedoing so requires learners to detour from the canonical and the leastcomputationally costly mapping.

5. HypothesesBased on the theoretical background and theoretical framework presentedthus far, to answer our research question, the following hypotheses are


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proposed concerning the acquisition of the English passive construction byChinese learners:

Hypothesis A: Lower level Mandarin L1 learners of English L2 willencode the patient as the subject when the patient is indicatd by thepragmatic context as the more prominent entity.

Tomlins (1995, 1997) cross-linguistic study showed that native Englishspeakers consistently realised the patient as the subject when it wascontextually more prominent than the agent. The native Mandarinspeakers of Taiwanese origin in Tomlins study also consistently narratedthe patient-cued trails using the passive b construction. Hypothesis Atherefore predicts that early Mandarin L1 learners will mirror theMandarin passive voice and use the simple English passive constructionsimilar to native English speakers.

Hypothesis B: Lower level Mandarin L1 learners of English L2 do nothave the necessary processing resournces to produce the passiveconstruction. Therefore they will encode the agent as the subject despite

the contextual and instructional cues presented. Advanced learners onthe other hand will be able to produce English passives comparable tonative English speakers.

The PT extension (Pienemann et al. 2005) predicts that since the canonicalmapping requires the least amount of processing resources, lower levellearners will consistently produce sentences by employing the canonicalmapping, even when the pragmatic context favours a non-canonicalmapping.

6. Research DesignInformants

In order to test Hypotheses A and B, a cross-sectional experimentwith seven informants and a control was conducted using a quantitativeapproach, which is commonly used in second language acquisition studies(Doughty & Long 2003).

Seven native Mandarin speakers were successfully recruited asinformants in the study: one at the beginner level, three at the earlyintermediate level, one at the late intermediate level and two at theadvanced level. The informants were choosen based on their highest level


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of formal adult ESL instruction received in Australia. The three earlyintermediate and one late intermediate learners were students at the AdultMigrant English Services (AMES), an adult ESL education provider inAustralia. The advanced learners were students enroled in the Bachelor ofArts program at the University of Western Sydney. In addition, a nativeEnglish speaker was engaged in the study both as control and to ensure the

appropriateness of the task in eliciting the target structure. All of theinformants participated as volunteers.The ESL abilities of the informants were determined by external

education providers. The beginner level learner had just arrived inAustralia two months earlier and did not possess the necessary L2 lexicalmeans to cope with the task given and was therefore excluded from thestudy.

In order to preserve the privacy of the informants, a fictitiousname is assigned to each of the informants for identification purposes. Thefollowing table gives an overview of the informants in our cross-sectionalstudy:

ESL Level PseudonymCountry of

Origin

No. of Years

in Australia

Other

Information

EarlyIntermediate

Suan China 2

Has beenstudyingEnglish for1.5 years

EarlyIntermediate

Ming Taiwan 2

Has beenstudyingEnglish for 2years

EarlyIntermediate

Mei Vietnam 25

Has beenstudyingEnglish for 2years

LateIntermediate Cindy China 8

Completed

510 hours ofESL atAMES

Advanced Zu China 2BA student atUWS

Advanced Chen China 2BA student atUWS

NativeControl

Linda Australia N/A

Table 1: An overview of the informants.


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Data Collection

An output elicitation task was used in the session with theintention of eliciting naturalistic spoken production of the English passiveconstruction from the informants. Since my aim was to subject the learnersto relatively coercive contextual conditions that would cause learners to

produce passives, I have to this end employed Tomlins (1995) Fish Film2

to create such conditions. TheFish Film is a 4 minute 40 second cartoonanimation. The animation clip visually manipulated informants visualattention to create a dynamic context, which has been demonstrated toreliably incline native English speakers to generate patient-fronting SVO(passive voice) utterances. It was subsequently used to investigate therelationship between structural outcomes and attention direction in nativespeakers of typologically different languages, including Chinese(Mandarin), Indonesian and Russian (Tomlin 1995, 1997).

The clip contained 32 trails. Each trail of the clip depicted twofish of different colours. The two fish would swim towards each otherfrom the two sides of the screen. As the two fish of each trail appeared onthe screen, either of the two would be visually cued by a flashing arrow

appearing above the selected fish. As the two fish reached each other at thecentre of the screen, one would swallow the other. The fish that was cuedwith the arrow could have been either the agent fish or the patient fish, theinformant only found out at the moment the one swallowed the other (seeFigure 1). The film ran at 12 frames per second. The direction of the agentfish (entering from the left or the right) was counterbalanced; the coloursof the two fish in each episode were randomly selected. In half the trailsthe agent was cued, in the other half the patient.

2 Copyrighted 2002-04 Russell S. Tomlin. Expressed consent to use the clip forresearch purposes is given on Tomlins website, which states: The Fish Film iscopyrighted: 2002-04 Russell S. Tomlin, though I am pleased for anyone to usethe film in support of basic research in linguistics, psychology, and relateddisciplines.


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Figure 1: TheFish Film. (Tomlin 1995, 1997)

The informants were instructed to keep up with the unfolding ofthe episodes and were asked to keep their eyes on the arrow-flashed


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Kenny Wang 109

referent, hence ensuring that their visual attention would be allocated tothe target fish at the crucial moment (swallowing): The informants were togive an online narration of the events as they unfolded. The entire sessionwas tape recorded and transcribed for analysis.

7. ResultsOf the 32 trails in theFish Film, 16 were patient-cuing trails. This

means that each participant was subjected to 16 passive constructionfriendly contexts. Linda the control in this study produced 15 passives outof the 16 passive-construction friendly contexts, which corroboratedTomlins claim that the Fish Film task was a very coersive context toproducing the English passive construction.

The overall performance and the number of each type ofnarrations by the cross-sectional informants is organised in Table 2 below:

FrequencyName English Level Passive Agent-

Active

Patient-

ActiveLinda Native Speaker 15 1 0

SusanEarly

Intermediate0 16 0

MingEarly

Intermediate0 16 0

MeiEarly

Intermediate0 15 0

CindyLate

Intermediate0 11 5

Zu Advanced 12 4 0

Chen Advanced 15 1 0

Table 2: Frequency table of the types of narrations by informants.

The empirical data showed that all three early intermediate level learnersconsistently encoded the agent as the subject regardless of which entitywas cued, producing the active construction in the canonical SVO wordorder and mapping in all trails.


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In the case of our late intermediate learner Cindy, of the 16 trailswhere the patient was visually cued, Cindy quite consistently, in 11 out of16 instances, encoded the agent as the subject despite the visual cuing ofthe patient. For the remaining 5 instances, she adopted an alterantivestrategy where she narrated the event from the patients perspective, inessence converting the patient to an agent of the same event followed by

an accompanying active voice predicate (e.g. the dog chased the cat/the catran away from the dog). Cindys performance suggested that while shestill relied quite heavily on the canonical mapping, she had slightly moreprocessing resources at her disposal.

The two advanced learners performance was much more similarto the native control, suggesting that they had the necessary processingresources to select the most pragmatically felicitous syntactic structure intheir on-line construction of descriptive utterances.

Examples of Responses

Let us now turn to some examples of each participantsproduction for the passive-cuing trails. Starting with our control, Linda

produced 15 passives out of 16 passive friendly trails, achieving a 94% hitrate. This is very close to Tomlins 100% individuated prediction. Atypical response by Lindas to a patient-cuing trail is given below:

(6)

TrailNo.

Visually CuedPatient

Lindas Narration

12 Green fish

now the green one gotswallowed by the pink one. ithad the arrow on it. the greenone

The early intermediate learner, Mei, is from Vietnam, butMandarin is her first language. Although she had been in Australia for 25years, she had been working in a non-English speaking workplace formost of that time, during which her contact with the English speakingworld and her use of English had been extremely limited. She had justbeen retired for two years when the data collection session took place andhad just taken up full-time English study 1.5 years prior to the time of datacollection. Mei, produced 0 out of 16 patient-cuing trails. She used agent-actives despite the cuing arrows in 15 of the 16 trails and missed one traildue to long hesitance:


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(7)

TrailNo.


Meis Narration

11 Blue fish the green. eat the blue

17 Red fish the grey eat the red

Ming had been studying English for 2 years at AMES. She produced 0 outof the 16 patient-cuing trails. Ming consistently used the default canonicalorder, assigning the agent the subject despite the cuing arrows:

(8)

TrailNo.


Mings Narration

11 Blue fishand the green and the blue. the.green eat the blue

25 Black fish

the black and the white.. and the

white eat the black

Suan had been studying English at AMES for 1.5 years. She produced 0out of the 16 patient-cued trails. Like Ming, Suan also consistently usedthe default canonical order, assigning the agent the subject despite thecuing arrows:

(9)

TrailNo.


Suans Narration

6 Pink fish the blue fish eat pink fish

17 Red fish the grey fish eat red fish

The performance of Cindy the late intermediate learner in thestudy is of particular interest. Cindy had been in Australia for 8 years. Shehad completed 510 hours of adult ESL course at AMES and had reachedAMES late intermediate level. Cindy produced 0 passive out of the 16patient-cued trails. Of the 16 patient-cued trails, Cindy produced 11 agentactives despite the presence of the arrows cuing the patient fish. All of the11 responses are listed in (10) below:


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(10)

TrailNo.


Cindys Narration

2 Red fish Blue fish eat red fish

3 Blue fish Green fish eat blue. fish

8 Black fish Red eat black

10 Red fish Blue eat red

11 Blue fish Green fish eat blue. fish

12 Green fish Pink eat blue. green

16 Pink fish Red eat pink

20 Blue fish Pink eat blue

21 Pink fish White white eat pink

22 White fish Black eat white

27 Black fish White eat black

However, for the remaining 5 patient-cued trails, Cindy employed acompensatory strategy which I shall call the Patient-Active Strategy. ThePatient-Active Strategy essentially means that the learner maps the patientof an event to the subject, therefore organises the sentence in asyntactically canonical order. The learner at the same time selects a verbthat takes a perspective that corresponds to that of the patient, thuseffectively converting the patient of the event into the agent of the sameeventuality but as seen from an alternative perspective. This strategy thenis akin to the principles of frame semantics purported by Fillmore andPetruck (Fillmore 1985, 2006; Petruck 1996). The following are the 5instances where Cindy employed the Patient-Active Strategy:

(11)

TrailNo.


Cindys Narration

4 Green fish The green fish in pink fish

6 Pink fishThe pink fish eat eat black(revised upon trail replay): pinkfish come in black fish


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Kenny Wang 113

17 Red fish Red. goes white

18 White fish The white goes go go to blue

29 Grey fish Grey go to white

For the advanced learners, Zu was a first year student in the

Bachelor of Arts program at the University of Western Sydney. Heproduced 12 passives out of 16 patient-cued trails, achieving a 75% hitrate. Zus use of the English passive construction is much more native-likethan early learners active voice. Two examples of his sentences in thepassive voice are given below:

(12)

TrailNo.


Zus Narration

11 Blue fisha blue fish with arrows wereeaten by green fish from right

17 Red fish a red fish with arrows comefrom left right ah eaten by a greyfish

Chen is also a first year student in the Bachelor of Arts program at theUniversity of Western Sydney. He achieved a 94% hit rate or 15 out of 16passives. With the exception of one trail, Chen otherwise quiteconsistently mapped the cued patient onto the subject:

(13)

TrailNo.


Chens Narration

11 Blue fishthe blue one is swallowed by thegreen one

12 Green fishand the green one swallowed bythe pink one

Overall, the performance of the six informants and the nativecontrol is shown in Fig. 1:


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0 0 0 0

12 15 15

0

10

20

Numberof

Pass

ives

Min

g

Susan

Mei

Cin

dy ZuChe

n

Linda

Number of Passives Produced by Each Informant

Ming

Susan

Mei

Cindy

Zu

Chen

Linda

Figure 1: Number of passives produced by each informant.

The results of the study overwhelmingly rejectsHypothesis A and supportsHypothesis B.

8. Conclusion and Implications of the StudyOur empirical data has demonstrated that, as hypothesised by

UAH and LMH, lower level Mandarin L1 learners of English L2 do notpossess the necessary procedural skills to assign prominence to thesemantic patient role by means of promoting it to the subject function. Theearly intermediate learners in the study fared as hypothesised by LMH,they consistently failed to incorporate any prominence attribution in theirL2 syntax; only the two advanced learners of English L2 were able to copewith the patient-cuing pragmatic contexts by producing sentences usingthe pragmatically appropriate yet non-canonical syntactic mapping. Iinterpret the absence of prominence attribution through syntax on the partof the lower level learners as due to their lack of the necessary processingresources to handle the non-canonical mapping of the patient onto thesubject. Furthermore, the late intermediate learner in the study, Cindy, wasfairly reliant on the canonical order. However, when visually inclined bythe context to produce the passive construction, in the absence of thenecessary processing skills to produce the passive construction, she wasnonetheless able to map the relatively more prominent patient to thesubject on five occasions. Cindys compensatory Patient-Active Strategyshowed that while her limited processing resources still confined her toreserving the subject for the agent, she was nevertheless able to assign the


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Kenny Wang 115

more prominent participant to the sentence initial position at times,thereby preserving the same pragmatic focus within the boundaries of herprocessability as warranted by the context.

In conclusion, the results of the study indicate that learnerssensitivity to discourse-pragmatic contexts does interface with their L2syntax; however such interface is developmentally moderated; that is,

learners ability to manipulate the semantic role to grammatical functionalignment is subject to their having the necessary processing resources forthe specific L2 constructions in question.

The empirical evidence of this study has a number of implicationsfor language teaching, syllabus design and language assessment. TheTeachability Hypothesis (Pienemann 1989) suggests that formal languageinstruction should work with and facilitate the natural acquisition sequence.This study highlights the importance for TESOL educators to adopt anESL learner processability oriented paedegogical approach and syllabusdesign to teaching the grammatical voices. In terms of languageassessment, this study may contribute to the inclusion of non-canonicalsyntax as a new dimension in the future development of linguisticprofiling using Rapid Profile (Keler & Keatinge 2008), thus further

enhancing the robustness of this language profiling and online assessmentprocedure.

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