On The Acquisition Of Chinese Hedges For Foreign Students And The Teaching

The target of this research is a kind of category in vague linguistics, which is called "hedges". Hedges could be a word or a phrase. In this thesis, we mainly study on the acquisition of Chinese hedges of foreign students’Chinese learning. The concept of hedges means that a word or a phrase intends to make things more obscure or less obscure. Among all the former relevant research, all that people concerned were the classification of hedges, the semantic features and the pragmatics features of hedges. But few people focused on hedges from the point view of second language acquisition. But it is because those hedges play an important role in both semantic features and pragmatics features, we could not ignore to do the research about the language acquisition of hedges. Because once a sentence or an expression is lack of relevant hedges, the sentence or the expression will be inaccurate or inappropriate in the meaning, or even inaccurate in the grammar. So, hedges are a very important part of language expression.In this thesis, firstly, we compared the topographies of Chinese hedges between Chinese inter-language corpus and Chinese native language corpus and we made a statistic analysis of the difference between these two corpuses. The result proved that even foreign students of intermediate level still differentiate from native speakers a lot when they use Chinese hedges, which means foreign students have not learned the rules of using Chinese hedges. Secondly, we emphasized on summarizing the rules of using hedges according to the native language corpus. Then we found that there are two basic rules when using hedges to help with your spoken Chinese:the first rule is that some hedges help to complete a sentence grammatically, this kind of usage of Chinese hedges is called objective type; the other hedges help to express the speaker’s subjective needs, and this kind of usage of Chinese hedges is called subjective type. Further, we analyzed the errors of Chinese hedges made by foreign students according to these two types, at last we talked about two teaching method that will be helpful for foreign students to use Chinese hedges, one method is teaching with language chunk, the second is teaching with specific context. The first method can help them to understand the semantic features of Chinese hedges better and memorize them easier. The second method can help to encourage students to output more hedges properly.The thesis is composed of six chapters.The first chapter is introduction. It includes reasons of choosing this topic, meaning of this topic and research thoughts of this topic.The second chapter is relevant research summarize about hedges. It includes the conception of hedges, the induction of hedges’semantic features and pragmatic features, the classification of hedges and some applicative research about hedges.The third chapter is the main part. it is an investigation of the difference of using hedges between two corpus. And the result shows that the difference is obvious. So it means that foreign Chinese learners have not acquainted all the rules of hedges. At the end of this chapter, we summarized the characteristics of the usage of foreign students, we also summarized the characteristics of the usage of native speakers.Chapter four is the chapter based on chapter three, in this part, we go deeper to find out the errors made by foreign students when they use Chinese hedges. And then we classified all the errors into four categories.Chapter five is the teaching method part of this thesis. According to the conclusion we made from chapter three and chapter four, we will find out some proper ways to teach Chinese hedges in an efficient way.Chapter six is the conclusion from all the research above.