A Study Of Noun Plural Acquisition By Chinese Learners Of English

Within the framework of Minimalist Program,this thesis makes an research into noun plural marking by Chinese college students in their English studies. There often exists the omission of functional categories in second language learners'production, which motivates scholars to deliberate whether second language learners'Interlanguage Grammar system is impaired or not? This thesis is aimed at testifying the debate whether such impairment exists or not and also it is devoted to revealing the root of the omission of functional categories in second language.With the assistance of Spoken and Written English corpus of Chinese Learners and with the sources deriving from the marking of noun plurals in written contexts and spoken contexts by English-major college students, the thesis carries out an empirical study. And three hypotheses put forward at the beginning of the study are specified as follows: firstly, in line with the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis, it is presumed that Chinese students are incapable of inflecting noun plurals in written contexts as well as spoken contexts; secondly, in accordance with the Morphological Misreading Hypothesis, it can be argued that Chinese students tend to omit final consonants of all English words; lastly, in agreement with the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis, it is speculated that Chinese students fail to mark noun plurals both in regular plural changes and in irregular ones. The results show that: first of all, the majority of Chinese students can correctly inflect noun plurals, which presents an implication that second language learners'Interlanguage Grammar system is perfect; besides, Chinese students never omit final consonants of all English words in spoken contexts; still, the asymmetry of Chinese students'marking on noun plurals is demonstrated, and specifically the accuracy on the marking of irregular noun plurals is higher than that of regular ones. The findings get the preceding three hypotheses fully verified.This thesis makes an attempt to provide explanations for the omission of surface morphology of noun plural's marking from the perspective of feature-re-assembly hypothesis and moreover interpret the asymmetry of the marking between regular noun plurals and irregular noun plurals by Chinese students from the point of view of prominence, expecting, to a certain extent, to furnish English teaching with new theoretical and practical references.