The thematic and non-thematic verbs asymmetry in L2 Chinese: An abstract features non-droppability account

The availability of Universal Grammar (UG) in adult second language acquisition (SLA) has received considerable attention in recent years. In this article, we investigate the interpretation of Chinese thematic and non-thematic verbs by adult English speakers in relation to two UG-related theories, namely the Valueless Features Hypothesis (Eubank, 1993, Eubank, 1994, Eubank, 1996) and the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou, 2007). Two groups of adult English speakers of L2 Chinese were invited to take part in a grammaticality judgement test consisting of thematic and non-thematic verbs. Their responses were compared with those of a native control group. It was found that there is an asymmetry in the non-native speakers’ mental representation of the grammars concerned. They allow thematic verbs to remain in situ but non-thematic verbs to raise. Results of the study argue against the Valueless Features Hypothesis, which posits that the L1 syntactic features of INFL are initially inert and are not transferred. Instead, the results support the Interpretability Hypothesis, which argues for the inaccessibility of uninterpretable features beyond a critical period. In particular, the study pursues a possible scenario not made explicit by the Interpretability Hypothesis whereby syntactic features selected during early stages of primary language acquisition would be difficult to lose if those features did not exist in L2 (Kong, 2011b).