Error Analysis: Chinese Students' Overgeneration Of English There-Be Construction

Existential constructions have always been conceived as one of the most prevailing and perplexing issues in language study. A great number of scholars from different linguistic schools have contributed to the research of existential constructions. Schachter and Rutherford (1979) noted the"surprising regularity"of existential sentences in the compositions written by Chinese speakers.This overgeneration problem is assumed to arise from the interactions of the syntactic structure, the semantic import as well as the discourse function of the learners'native and target language. This study attempts to investigate to what extent the multiple dimensions of Chinese students'mother tongue constrain, under the influence of the typological universals and their interplay with different features of the L1 and the L2, the generation of this particular interlanguage existential construction, by analyzing students'errors in there-existential construction learning, which demonstrates the stages of their learning this structure. Through the quantitive and qualitative analysis of the 90 writings by 90 high school students and the students'translation on 20 Chinese"you"sentences, the assumptions about the causes of this interlanguage phenomenon are confirmed. The results of the present study show that the structural resemblance between Mandarin you-sentences and English there be structures facilitate, to a great extent, the occurrence of the interlanguage there be sentences. Pragmatically, the topic-prominence of Mandarin may predispose Chinese learners to employ there be to introduce a new referent into the L2 discourse. Semantically, the definiteness constraint on Mandarin subjects has been shown to exert considerable influence on Chinese learners'tendency to overuse English there be sentences. This cross-linguistic study lends empirical support to the claim that Chinese learners'overproduction of there be sentences is attributable to the interaction of the inherent properties and functions of the learners'L1 and L2.