Markedness Theory And L1 Collocation Transfer

Vocabulary learning, especially collocation knowledge is of critical importance to the language learners, and is one of the most difficult parts of a language for the learners to acquire. It is proved in teaching practice that vocabulary competence could not be departed from the understanding cultural background of a language. The culture diversity results in many differences between Chinese and English in both meaning and usage of lexical collocations. There exist some similarities in the construction of collocations between different languages, and thus collocation errors are always found in learners'interlanguage in second language acquisition(SLA), the source of many of which can, according to the studies of language transfer, be traced to the negative influence of the first language(usually the mother tongue) of the learners.In fact, the discussion of L1's influence on L2 learning has been about half century in the course of second language acquisition(SLA) research. Behaviorists'view considers that L1 is the main block in L2 learning, while mentalists demonstrate that L1 is an insignificant factor in SLA. A revived recognition of the importance of L1in L2 learning is seen in the cognitive school, which implies that L1 influence should not be ignored. Ellis put forward six factors which constrain the process of language transfer: (1)language level; (2)social factors; (3)markedness; (4)prototypicality; (5)language distance and psychotypology; (6) developmental factors.Up till now, many researches about lexical collocation are done from the perspective of contrastive analysis or error analysis, focusing on the differences between L1 and L2 and by which prediction of the difficulty in SLA may be made. As a matter of fact, not only the language differences will bring the difficulty into SLA, but also the markedness differences of the two languages can cause troubles. However, seldom researches are done in the way of combining the two together, which limit the further development of the study of the relationship between transfer and SLA.This paper studies the acquisition of the collocation within the markedness theory framework ,and aims to clear up the influence of L1 on the acquisition order of collocation: first, introducing markedness theories, discussing the relationship between markedness theories and language transfer, and then putting forward the main point of this thesis: (1) when the collocation of L1 and its corresponding collocation of L2 are both unmarked, the learners will transfer the unmarked collocation of L1 with litL2e efforts; (2) when the collocation of L1 is unmarked and its corresponding collocation of L2 is marked, the learners will transfer the unmarked collocation of L1; (3) when the collocation of L1 is marked and its corresponding collocation of L2 is unmarked, the learners will refuse to transfer the marked collocation of L1;(4) when the collocation of L1 and its corresponding collocation of L2 are both marked, the learners may transfer the marked collocation of L1; last, proving the point of view by experiment. This experiment is done on 60 college students in Chong Qing Pai Si College. The data is calulated and the results turned out to support the main points of the thesis. The author also make some statements of results and discuss the result with related theories in SLA, which help us to predict Chinese students'difficulty in the process of learning collocations and are of pedagogical significance.