LAUSR

Abstract English and Chinese have typological differences in finiteness. English has morphological finite and nonfinite distinction, whereas Chinese has no morphological finiteness, and multiple verbs in a clause appear in the form of bare verbs with optional aspectual morphemes, such as the perfective morpheme “le”. The current study explores whether and how the lack of morphological finite and nonfinite distinctions in Chinese influences Chinese EFL (English as Foreign Language) learners’ acquisition of English finite and nonfinite distinctions. The analysis of Chinese learners’ English corpus showed evidence of both morphological transfer of bare verbs and morphosyntactic transfer by over-inflecting nonfinite verbs in English writing. These results evidenced the crosslinguistic influence on Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English finite and nonfinite distinctions. The crosslinguistic influence also had an interaction with L2 proficiency, that is, low proficiency learners tended to have both morphological and syntactic transfer whereas with the development of L2 proficiency, syntactic transfer was reduced dramatically while morphology remained to be a problem. It thus revealed Chinese learners’ developmental route and implied their morphological insensitivity.