Quantitative Analysis Of Developmental Features Of Interlanguage In Chinese EFL Learners’ Writings

It has been over 50 years since the concept of "interlanguage" was first proposed by Larry Selinker in 1969.Early studies on interlangauge mostly are qualitative research.In recent years,although empirical research has increased,most of them focused on the specific and partial language phenomena,and less attention was paid to the overall development characteristics of interlanguage.This research combines the dependency syntax and quantitative linguistic methods,using four aspects of quantitative indicators:the mean dependency distance,the probability distribution of dependency distances,the dependency direction,and the quantitative measures in complex network,to study the overall development characteristics of interlanguage in Chinese EFL learners’ writingsFirst,we calculated the overall mean dependency distance,and the mean dependency distances of subjects,objects,adverbials and attributives of the interlanguage at different language learning stages.It is found that the syntactic complexity of the interlanguage gradually increases with the improvement of the learners’ second language proficiency.However,the syntactic complexity of some more fine-grained syntactic structures changes dynamically.In addition,we calculated the probability distributions of dependency distances of different writing proficiency and found that they can satisfy certain exponential or power distributions,including the Zipf-Alekseev distribution model.Moreover,the parameter in the distribution model can well reflect the learners’writing proficiencyThen,we calculated the overall dependency direction,the dependency directions of subjects,objects,adverbials and attributives of the interlanguage at different language learning stages.The results showed that the distribution of the overall dependency direction of interlanguage gradually approaches the level of the target language,indicating that from the perspective of linguistic typology,the interlanguage becomes more and more close to the target language.The distributions of dependency directions of the subjects and objects both have slight changes and are always between those of the native language and the target language.The distributions of dependency directions of the adverbials and attributives gradually approach the level of the target languageNext,we used quantitative measures in complex network to describe the development of interlanguage.It is found that with the improvement of learners’language proficiency,the number of vertices and edges all increase,indicating the improvement of lexical richness of interlanguage.However,the average degree does not show regular changes,demonstrating it is not a suitable index to measure the lexical richness.The node degree of the interlanguage presents power law distribution,indicating that the networks of interlanguage of different language proficiency levels are scale-free.A few nodes have very high node degrees,demonstrating that a few words have the strong ability of combining with other words to form syntactic relations.The gradual downward trend of the clustering coefficient and the upward trend of the average path length indicate that the lexical forms in the interlanguage are becoming more and more diversifiedFinally,based on the developmental changes of the above four aspects of quantitative measures,it is found that interlanguage owns the characteristics of systematicity,dynamicity,approximability and unreachability to the target language Interlanguage is a natural language system independent of the native language and the target language.After experiencing the pre-system stage,it dynamically and gradually approaches the target language,but becomes fossilized at a certain stageThis study used the large-scale authentic linguistic materials covering Chinese English learners at all language learning stages to more scientifically discover the developmental patterns of interlanguage and to more comprehensively understand the entire process of second language acquisition,especially for beginners.At the same time,this study used the research methods combining dependency syntax and quantitative linguistics to describe the development of interlanguage in a more scientific,elaborate and comprehensive manner.