The Effects of Cross-linguistic Influence on the Use of English Dative Constructions in Second Language Written Production

Abstract

This paper attempted to analyze the effectiveness of cross-linguistic influence on the EFL learners’ production of English dative constructions by using a written corpus. Dative constructions – double object (DO, e.g., Tom gave Mary the book) and prepositional dative (PD, e.g., Tom gave the book to Mary) construction – have attracted much attention in the domain of SLA and cross-linguistic influence due to their distinctions across many languages (Whong-Barr & Schwartz, 2002). In particular, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese EFL learners’ corpus were chosen in the present research because the syntactic and semantic perspectives on the dative structures of their L1s are varied. To reach the aims of this study, the frequency of English DO and PD structures in EFL learners’ and English native speakers’ written corpus (ICNALE) was compared. The results indicated that (ⅰ) Chinese group used significantly more DO constructions than Korean and Japanese groups; (ⅱ) Korean and Japanese groups showed no significant difference in using English dative structures, addressing their infrequent use of DO construction in L1s; (ⅲ) only Chinese group showed native-like use of English dative constructions. These findings suggested that cross-linguistic influence affects the acquisition and production of English dative structures of EFL learners and they involved the pedagogical implication.