A Pragmatics Function Study On Vietnamese Students Acquiring Chinese Passive Sentences

The Chinese passive sentence, a particular pattern, is an important part in teaching Chinese to foreigners. We emphasize the grammatical pattern of passive sentence, but neglected the pragmatics function in teaching. This paper tries to study the law of Vietnamese students acquiring Chinese passive sentences as the acquisition, which may instruct us to pay more attention to the teaching of pragmatics function of Chinese passive sentence. Chinese passive sentence is a generalized patient subjective sentence. The passive sentence in this paper is the narrow sense and notational Chinese passive sentence. We study the Chinese passive sentence in "classical situation", "ordinary situation", and "specific situation". The achievements of acquiring Chinese passive sentence in second language acquisition are mainly in the acquisition of grammatical pattern, and seldom in the acquisition of pragmatics function. In order to do this study, we have done the investigation of interlanguage corpus, inducing experimentations of speaking and writing while seeing pictures, and the quantitative and qualitative analysis. In the survey, we conclude that the proportion of Vietnamese students use passive sentences in classical situation is the highest, ordinary situation the lowest because of the influence of native language and the difficulty of Chinese passive sentence higher than common sentence pattern. In the classical and "theme propulsion"situation the usage of passive sentences is more than others, and while emphasizing the condition of agent the usage of it is few. In the corpus, there are some situation in which should use passive sentences but not and should not use of it but do. The misapplications can be classified as the misapplication in discourse cohesiveness and sensation, no-patient subjectivity and topic subjectivity. In the discourse cohesion function of passive sentences, Vietnamese students generally use theme propulsion model. Students have grasped this kind of model in the primary stage, while apply it in practice they still repeat the theme of the former sentence, which means that Vietnamese students are not skillful at the discourse cohesion; in the middle stage, there are passive sentences and "catenulate"sentences, but some of the students bring on grammatical errors while assuring the cohesiveness of discourse; in the advanced stage, the second cohesive model disappears while amount of third cohesive way appears which even more than the second one, which shows that students no longer stand on the cohesiveness formally but to make the "zero"cohesive of discourse. This is a great progress. In the primary stage, some students cannot make the cohesive of discourse by using the passive sentence because of the shortage of vocabulary, which is one of the acquisitive stages; when they have made some progress in acquiring more vocabulary and express more fluently, they can handle the passive sentence to do discourse cohesiveness. When students express discourse, the different topics may have different sentence pattern; and the choose of different sentence pattern when talk about the same topic shows students'different abilities of Chinese expression; the different Chinese expressing abilities reflect on the different narrative ways in the same topic and influence the choose of sentence pattern. Studying the acquisition of second language aims the instruction of teaching in practice. While we survey the text books we are using, it is clear that the emphasis of grammar more than the pragmatics function, and the disadvantage is that students know what kind of pattern is right but do not know when to use it and when not. So the grammar, semantics, and pragmatics should be in the same stage when composing the text books. In the pragmatics, we should explain and practice the different sentiment and discourse functions and styles of passive sentence and some special usages of it from the primary stage. During writing text books, must hold the "function-structure"pattern as the outline; combine the functional items and grammar forms of passive sentences. At last in the class, we should induce the student to express in passive pattern and pay more attention to the oral practice while teachers should give more instructions. Through this exploration we discover some laws of acquirement of the passive sentence pragmatics function, and understand the same importance of pragmatics and grammatical structure in the second language acquisition.