论文总字数：49853字

摘 要

近年来，随着全球一体化进程不断加快，中国与世界各国，尤其是欧美等国在政治、经济、文化等领域的交流越来越频繁。在以英语为官方语言的国家中，汉语的普及率也在不断提高，这对于提高中国文化地位、传播中国文化有着重要的现实意义。汉语属于汉藏语系，缺乏词的形态变化，语序和虚词是其实现语法意义的重要手段，而英语属于印欧语系，在语序问题上和汉语有很大的不同。以英语为母语的学习者在习得汉语语序的过程中，尤其是状语语序上会有较大的偏误。偏误的产生对于汉语习得者在阅读、写作、口语交流等方面起到了负面作用。

本文以北京语言大学HSK动态作文语料库中的语料为基础，辅以问卷调查和访谈对英语背景汉语学习者在汉语状语语序的习得进行分析研究，发现在单项状语中，学习者主要在时间状语、地点状语、程度状语上以及一些介词短语充当状语时出现偏误；在多项状语中，最主要的错误则出现在多项状语的排序上。通过对问卷和访谈结果的分析讨论，归纳出引起偏误的主要原因有三，分别是英语的负迁移作用、汉语本身的复杂性以及教学及教材的不足。针对以上几点原因，作者分别提出了对汉语学习者以及教学者的建议。为了提高学习效率，学习者需采取恰当的学习策略、培养汉语语感，同时要加强真实语言环境中的交流。就教学者而言，教师应当革新教学方式、采用适当的教学策略，并且在语序习得方面进行更加深入的研究以编纂合适的教学材料。

关键词：英语背景学习者；汉语状语语序习得；偏误分析

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

English Abstract ii

Chinese Abstract iii

Table of Contents iv

List of Tables vi

List of Figures vii

Chapter One Introduction 1

1.1 Background of the Study 1

1.2 Significance of the Study 2

1.3 Layout of the Thesis 2

Chapter Two Literature Review 4

2.1 Corpora and Corpus Linguistics 4

2.1.1 Corpora 4

2.1.2 Corpus Linguistics 5

2.1.2.1 Definition, Origin and Development 5

2.1.2.2 Methods and Application 6

2.2 Study of Chinese and English Word Order 6

2.2.1 Summary 6

2.2.2 Comparison between Chinese and English Adverbial Word Order 7

2.3 Language Transfer 8

2.3.1 Definition 8

2.3.2 Classification 9

Chapter Three Research Methodology 10

3.1 Research Objectives 10

3.2 Participants 10

3.3 Instruments 10

3.3.1 Questionnaire 10

3.3.2 Interview 11

3.4 Data Collection 11

Chapter Four Data Analysis and Discussions 12

4.1 Data Analysis 12

4.1.1 Questionnaire 12

4.1.2 Interview 13

4.2 Discussions 15

4.2.1 Errors of Chinese Attributive Order of English-background Learners 15

4.2.1.1 Errors of Chinese Single Adverbials 15

4.2.1.2 Errors of Chinese Multiple Adverbials 17

4.2.2 Reasons of Errors 18

4.2.2.1 Negative Transfer of English 18

4.2.2.2 Complexity of Chinese Language Knowledge 18

4.2.2.3 Inadequacy of Chinese Teaching and Teaching Materials 19

4.2.3 Suggestions 20

4.2.3.1 Suggestions for Learners 20

4.2.3.2 Suggestions for Teachers 20

Chapter Five Conclusions 22

5.1 Major Findings 22

5.2 Limitations of the Thesis and Suggestions for Future Study 22

References 23

Appendix 1 26

Appendix 2 29

List of Tables

Table 1: The Top 10 Types of Grammar Errors.............................................................1

Table 2: The Top 4 Types of Wrong Word Order...........................................................2

Table 3: Numbers of Learners Making Mistakes.........................................................12

Table 4: Numbers of Different Groups of Learners Making Mistakes........................12

List of Figures

Figure 1: Learners Making Mistakes in the Total Number...........................................13

Figure 2: Learners of Different Groups Making Mistakes...........................................13

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study

As a cultural giant, at the same time of absorbing the best of many cultures, China is badly in need of exporting its own culture. During that process, it’s important for Chinese language to be more popularized. In recent decades, with the accelerated globalization, more and more frequent exchanges of politics, economics and culture are being made between China and western countries. Meanwhile Chinese is enjoying higher popularity in English-speaking countries and more and more people have also been coming to China to learn Chinese language, which is of considerable significance for the advancement of its international status.

Since the forms of Chinese words never change, generally it is through function words and word order that the grammatical meaning of Chinese language is conveyed while English, a language branch of the Indo-European, is an inflectional language and differs greatly from Chinese, so it’s unavoidable for English-speaking people to make grammar mistakes. According to the data and statistics of HSK Composition Corpus, the top 10 types of grammar errors made by learners from five main English-speaking countries—Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and Singapore—are listed in Table 1.

Table 1

This table shows that wrong word order bears the largest proportion. The collected 178 materials of wrong word order are also divided into different types; the result is shown in Table 2.

Table 2

From Table 2, it’s clear that inappropriate adverbial order achieves the highest percentage. Therefore it is meaningful to study Chinese adverbial order acquisition of English-background learners.

1.2 Significance of the Study

Based on HSK Composition Corpus and supported by questionnaire and interview, this thesis focuses on the analysis of the process of Chinese adverbial order acquisition of English-background learners and the possible reasons of errors. It also offers some suggestions to learners to help them overcome the negative effect of their mother tongue and way of thinking and therefore boost learning efficiency. In addition, advice for foreign Chinese teaching is also included, aimed at enriching contents of Chinese courses and improving strategies.

1.3 Layout of the Thesis

This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one briefly introduces the research background and significance. Chapter two mainly reviews the related research achievements, including basic theories of corpora and corpus linguistics as well as the features of and comparison between Chinese and English adverbial order. Chapter three is the research methodology, including questionnaire and interview of English-background learners and data collection and its organization. Chapter four contains the analysis of adverbial order errors from corpus and the possible reasons and offers some advice for Chinese learners and teachers. The conclusion chapter makes a summary of the major findings, states the limitations of this thesis and also provides several suggestions for future study.

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Corpora and Corpus Linguistics

2.1.1 Corpora

Many linguists have precisely defined what a corpus is and stated its difference from other collection of language such as text achieves:

“A corpus is a collection of texts assumed to be representative of a given language, dialect, or other subset of a language to be used for linguistic analysis.” (N. Francis 1992: 17 quoting Francis 1982: 7)

“A corpus is a collection of a naturally-occurring language text, chosen to characterize a state or variety of a language.”(Sinclair 1991: 171)

Generally speaking, a corpus is a systematic and structured computerized database of written or spoken texts. It differs from text archives in that the former focuses more on the volume of language data and the variety of data sources(Edwards 1993). The object of corpora is the performance of human language rather than language competence(Li 1999). Corpora are usually intended for various purposes, according to which there are different types of corpora, such as general corpus, specialized corpus, parallel corpora, monitor corpus, and learner corpus(Huston 2002) to which HSK Composition Corpus that this study is based on belongs.

Nowadays the corpus has been widely applied in different fields. Basically it can be used to study different aspects of languages from morphemes to vocabulary and from syntactic structure to discourse analysis. In addition, one of the increasingly important application is language teaching and learning. A large amount of corpus-based research suggests that the meaning and usage of some words in real language environment are different from the definition or description in dictionaries. Therefore the significance of corpora is that it can provide more detailed, complete and reliable authentic language data, thus it is playing a more and more important role in syllabus devising, textbook development and lexicography(Li 1999). The application of corpora and corpus linguistics will be further explained in the following part.

2.1.2 Corpus Linguistics

2.1.2.1 Definition, Origin and Development

Corpus linguistics is a linguistic study method based on text corpus(Aijmer amp; Altenberg 1992: 1), including two aspects: one is annotating linguistic data, and the other is studying and applying the annotated data. Corpus linguistics proposes that reliable language analysis is more feasible with corpora collected in the field, in their natural contexts, and with minimal experimental-interference. Its subjects have developed from vocabulary, grammar and lexicography in early times to more extensive fields such as second language acquisition, information processing, translation and interpretation, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics(Wei 2009).

Corpus linguistics originated in the 19th century. Its development is usually divided into several phrases according to the rise and decline of Chomsky’s transformational-generative grammar(Ding 1998). The early corpus linguistics refers to all the language study based on language materials before the middle 1950s; during that time, the major concentrations were language acquisition, the study of phonology and dialectology(Ding 1998). In the early and middle 1950s, with the dominance of empiricism in language study, great importance was attached to language data, especially in America, where post-Bloomfieldian linguists represented by Z. Harris regarded language data as the only object of linguistics(Leech 1991: 8). However, as Chomsky put forward syntax theories, rationalism took the lead; study of language data was completely denied but it never ended, and the beginning of modern corpus linguistics were the establish of Survey of English Usage by R. Quirk in 1959 and Brown Corpus by N. Francis and H. Kucera in 1961; the two corpora also laid the foundation for the revival of corpus linguistics. Since 1980s, corpus linguistics has rapidly developed and boomed with the establish of second-generation corpora and increasing relevant research projects.

2.1.2.2 Methods and Application

There are two approaches of corpus linguistic. One is called corpus-based approach and the other is corpus-driven approach (Tognini-Bonelli 2001: 65- 98). Both of them reflect the feature of bottom-up method, which refers to from-data-to-theory method(Wei 2009). The difference is that according to corpus-based approach, language materials in the corpus will be annotated. In a word, research starts from the observation and processing of data (annotated or unannotated), and the research process can be summarized as extraction — observation — generalization — interpretation(Wei 2009). The corpus is used to validate a language theory. Essentially it an inductive method.

Corpora provide abundant language materials and examples for foreign language teaching and learning and help innovate teaching philosophy, methods and models. To be specific, first of all the authentic materials in spoken and written forms containing in corpora make students have more access to the language that native speakers speak in daily life, i.e., help narrow the gap between what students are taught in class and the language used in real situation. Some vocabulary or phrases can still be found in most dictionaries, but actually they are rarely used. For example, most Chinese students have learned the phrase “rain cats and dogs” and often use it in oral practice. However, this expression is out of date in modern English, which linguist Rundell(1995: 29) confirmed by virtue of British National Corpus. It doesn’t appear in the 10-million-word oral materials and appears only once in the 90-million-word written materials. In addition, corpora help students become more aware of the characteristics of different registers. Relevant research has shown that the frequency of occurrence of a certain language form differs in various registers(Xie 1996). For instance, Svartvik found that passive voice was most frequently used in scientific and technical literature and the least in advertisement.

2.2 Study of Chinese and English Word Order

2.2.1 Summary

Word order refers to the sequence of sentence constituents(Zhang 2002). In general, within a certain sentence every sentence constituent of any language has a relevantly fixed position; if the position is changed, the sentence may be grammatically wrong or its meaning may change accordingly. Chinese and English share several similarities in the aspect of word order—both of them are SV(subject-verb) languages to some extent.

However, the differences of the two languages are striking. According to Osgood(1980), there are two sorts of word orders in language, i.e., natural order and prominence order. In natural order, different constituents are arranged chronologically; but the pattern is the opposite in prominence order. Constituents are arranged according to the key point the speaker wants to stress, the speaker’s interest, etc. Chinese language belongs to analytical language emphasizing parataxis. Its word order usually corresponds with time. Therefore Chinese is mainly a natural-order language. For example:

1) 老关忙即跳下车去，摸摸腰间的勃郎宁，又向四下里瞥了一眼，就过去开了车门，站在门旁边。（Midnight by Mao Dun)

2) Old Guan quickly scrambled out of the car, placing his hand on the Browning at his side and glancing all round. Then he went round and opened the other door and stood holding it.

In the above example, both sentences are in chronological order. While in another example:

3) 她从北京坐火车经过郑州来到南京。

4) She came to Nanjing from Beijing through Zhengzhou by rail.

Here the sequence of English sentences constituents doesn’t obey time order while that of Chinese still does. So Chinese is a natural-order language while English is a language whose word order is combined with natural and prominence order(Zhang 2002).

2.2.2 Comparison between Chinese and English Adverbial Word Order

An adverbial is a word, phrase or clause which modifies the verb, adjective or the whole sentence. The adverbial can be classified into two categories in Chinese, i.e., descriptive adverbial that semantically modifies the action itself, and non-descriptive adverbial including adverbial of time, degree, place, etc.(Liu 1983). English adverbial is usually made up of adverbs, prepositional phrases, participles, infinitives, adjectives and clauses. In the aspect of adverbial order of the two languages, there also exist similarities and differences. For instance, in a sentence, some adverbials, such as adverbials or adverbial clauses of time, place, manner, condition, concession, purpose can be placed in the beginning in both languages. Take the following sentences as examples:

5) 尽管没人赞同他，他仍然坚持他自己的观点。

6) Although nobody agreed with him, he insisted on his own views.

When there are multi-adverbials in one sentence, Chinese word order should be “subject adverbial of time adverbial of place adverbial of manner verb object”(Huang amp; Liao 2002), while in English “subject verb object adverbial of manner adverbial of place adverbial of time” is the usual way of expression. For example, the translation of the Chinese sentence“我昨天在发布会上担任他的翻译” should be “I translated for him at the ceremony yesterday”. In addition, the sequence of two or more time or place adverbials in one Chinese sentence is exactly the opposite of that in English sentence. The arrangement of sentence constituent is like a inverted pyramid in Chinese(Zhang 2002). For example:

7) 简告诉艾米4月21号下午两点在会议室开会。

8) Jane told Amy to attend the meeting at 2 p.m. on 21st April.

9) 东南大学位于江苏省南京市江宁区东南大学路2号。

10) Southeast University is located at No.2 SEU Road, Jiangning District, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province.

2.3 Language Transfer

2.3.1 Definition

It’s hard to make a clear and complete definition of language transfer; it has long been a controversial topic; many linguistics have different ideas about its definition. Corder(1994) considers language transfer as a communicative strategy, i.e., borrowing. Faerch and Kasper(1994) thinks that language transfer is a psychological process of language. During that process, second language learners make use of their first language to develop or use interlanguage. Schachter(1974) regards language transfer as a constraint in the process of language learning instead of a psychological process. Odlin(2001) thinks that transfer is a kind of influence deriving from the similarities or differences between the target language and the language which has been acquired.

2.3.2 Classification

The forms of language transfer are various, mainly including positive transfer, negative transfer, avoidance, overuse and different lengths of acquisition. Positive transfer refers to the positive influence of first language on the acquisition of second language, while negative transfer refers to the negative influence. Avoidance is the phenomenon that learners make a conscious effort to avoid some sentence patterns or expressions due to the differences of the target language and the first language. Overuse can be seen as the result of avoidance or intralingual process, referring to the condition that learns tend to use the expressions that are considered simpler. Different lengths of time refers to the difference of the time learns need to master the target language caused by the difference of the difficulty of the target language to learners.

Chapter Three Research Methodology

3.1 Research Objectives

The research objectives, centering around the learning situation of Chinese adverbial order, include:

1. The mistakes they usually make in Chinese learning
2. The mistakes they usually make in single adverbial order
3. The mistakes they usually make in multiple adverbial order
4. Analysis of possible reasons of the mistakes
5. Suggestions for teachers and learners

3.2 Participants

There are 48 participants taking part in the questionnaire and interview. They are mainly overseas students from English-speaking countries such as America, British, Canada and Australia as well as some foreign teachers in high schools and universities, covering from beginners to the learners who have had quite a lot knowledge of Chinese. The selected three interviewees, William(24, from Britain), James(25, from Britain) and Elena(22, from America), are Chinese learners with various levels, making it easier to show both the common and different problems in different learning stages. The composition of the participants enables the thesis to study not only the common mistakes but also the differences of mistakes made by learners of different Chinese proficiency.

3.3 Instruments

3.3.1 Questionnaire

Based on the language data selected from HSK Composition Corpus and relevant theories and examples in literature, the major part of the questionnaire contains ten questions about Chinese adverbial order that are usually confusing to English speakers. Those questions are presented in three different forms; participants are asked to decide whether a Chinese sentence is correct or not, choose the correct version of a Chinese sentence and choose the appropriate translation for a certain English sentence. Part of the survey is presented for reference:

1. Which one of the following sentences is grammatically correct?

A. 我在2002年从美国奥克拉荷马州大学毕业。

B. 我从美国奥克拉荷马州大学毕业在2002年。

2. Is the sentence “我也以前喜欢流行歌曲” correct?

A. Yes

B. No

3. How to translate the sentence “You should spend more time practicing piano at home”?

A.你应该多花点时间在家练钢琴。

B.在家你应该花多点时间练钢琴。

3.3.2 Interview

The interview consists of ten questions. The first part of the interview is designed for more information about their difficulties and problems in their entire learning process in order to ensure whether or not grammar, especially word order is more difficult and whether it is grammar that sets up barriers for Chinese acquisition.

The second part centers around their understanding and acquisition of Chinese word order, especially adverbial order. Rather than focusing on the test of the interviewees’ mastery of Chinese adverbial order, it asks the interviewees to express their opinions on the respective characteristics and the comparison of English and Chinese adverbial order. Besides, they are also required to list some mistakes of adverbial order that they have made by providing specific examples.

In the last part, the interviewees need to think about what are the factors that lead to their mistakes, based on which they provide some advice for them learners and also state some existing problems in the current teaching.

3.4 Data Collection

After one week of distribution work, 48 valid questionnaires have been collected. There are three Chinese learners taking part in the interview; each interview lasted about 30 minutes. Since two of the interviewees are working in other cities, these two interviews were conducted online while the other interviewee was interviewed face to face. The records are reorganized systematically and the results are presented in Chapter 4.1.

Chapter Four Data Analysis and Discussions

4.1 Data Analysis

4.1.1 Questionnaire

The data show that about 56% of participants consider grammar is hard to learn, and more than half admit that the mistakes they often make are also about grammar, especially word order. Table 3 shows the number of learners who have made mistakes and the corresponding question.

Table 3

The data are also organized according to the learners’ mastery of Chinese in Table 4. Participants are divided into three groups: beginners(12), the mid-level learners(27) and advanced learners(9).

Table 4

Figure 1 shows the proportion of learners making mistakes in the total number and Figure 2 shows the proportion in the respective group.

Figure 1

Figure 2

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