The effect of Cross-Linguistic Influence in Mandarin learners of English on interpreting state-change verbs in English

Abstract

This thesis covers the discussion of the role of L1 Mandarin in the course of L2 English acquisition. I focus specifically on state-change verbs where English and Mandarin share some properties but diverge in interpretations, as a way of examining if Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2007, 2008, 2009) is extendable to other domains of grammar that are not explicitly discussed in previous literature. Noticeably, I don’t aim to test the predictions of the model in this thesis but use the model to examine the process of reassembling the state- change feature and investigate whether FRH can be extended to domains beyond syntax and morphosyntax.