L2 Acquisition Of English Nominalization By Chinese Learners

This thesis is an attempt to investigate how Chinese students acquire English nominalization. By nominalization I mean the process or result of forming a noun from a verb or adjective. For example. discover→discovery, careless→carelessness. hope →hope, X insists on Y→ the insisting of X on Y →X' s insistence.Since English nominalization is a complex combination of morphological and syntactic process, and since they prevail in written English and formal style, it is a main linguistic form for advanced learners to acquire. Also, nominalization relates to syntactic maturity and creativity. This makes the investigation necessary and worthwhile.The thesis begins with a linguistic analysis of English nominalization. Nominalization by its nature has properties of both nouns and verbs, and it combines the internal characteristics of a clause with the external characteristics of a noun phrase. During the process of converting a clause into a noun phrase, some information is lost and ambiguity may arise. The thesis explores the deep syntactic and semantic relations within nominalization constructions by investigating their various covert internal "case" relations. The stylistic features and functions of nominalization are also discussed from functionalist point of view.Nominalization in Chinese is very different from that in English. There is no formal variation in Chinese verbs, and because Chinese is topic-prominent language which allows many sentence fragments, the functions of nominalization also differ considerably between Chinese and English. These differences predict the difficulties for Chinese students in learning English nominalization.Although little literature is found in the acquisition of English nominalization, the related research on the acquisition of morphemes and syntactic structures paves the way for the present study. The famous debate between Lees' transformationalism and Chomsky's lexicalism about nominalization provides us with some insights in the mental representation and psycholinguistic process of nominalization. Based on the recent development of psycholinguistic theory and close observation on learner's interlanguage, I propose a third position toward the mental representation of nominalization, i.e. the dual representation hypothesis. By dual representation, I mean that lexical representation and transformational rules coexist in the process of nominalization. Those gerunds and derivations which are familiar to language users are retrieved directly from the mental lexicon, while those unfamiliar or unknown to language users arc generated or created according to transformational rules. This dualrepresentation hypothesis is a compromise solution and it can best explain the mental representation of nominalization.Since SLA is generally an information processing and cognitive process, this thesis adopts the cognitive framework as the rationale to account for the acquisition of nominalization. The operating principles and the multidimensional model specify the role of working memory capacity in L2 processing and acquisition. Since the morphosyntactic complexity and psychological complexity make greater demand on the working memory capacity, the processing problems that the learner has to confront in the acquisition of nominalization should be taken into consideration.The present research adopts a cross-sectional research method to investigate the shape of nominalization acquisition in university students, the developmental sequence of English nominalization, and the factors contributing to the acquisition of nominalization. Two pilot studies are conducted to formulate the hypothesis and field-test the research methods. With promising results from the pilot studies, three research question and hypotheses are formulated. The subjects consist of 96 students of English majors from all grades. The research includes three phases: (1) learner language analysis; (2) comprehension test; (3) reading span test and interview.Three general conclusions can be drawn from the results...