A Cognitive Study Of English Existential Construction Errors Made By Chinese Efl Learners

The Existential Construction is a commonly grammatical device with its high frequency use in English and Chinese, which is a hotly-discussed issue because of its own popularity, particularity and complexity for a long period and has drawn much attention of linguistic scholars both at home and abroad. Historically, Descriptive Approach, Generative Approach and Functional Approach have contributed to the study of this issue, three of which them have made their own contributions respectively from distinctive perspectives, especially in the field of a single language study. And most of their findings ascribe Chinese EFL learners'errors of EEC to L1 negative transfer alone, and consider the influence of Chinese-You sentence as main factor, but few of them put emphasis on differences and similarities between Chinese Existential Construction and English Existential Construction as well as interaction to each other in depth. That is to say, the comparative studies of English Existential Construction and Chinese Existential Construction are superficial and inadequate.By comparing the similarities and differences of definitions, classifications and functions between CEC and EEC and by adopting subsequence iconicity theory, Figure-Ground theory, trajector and landmark and the search domain theory from the cognitive linguistics, the present study tries to explore the underlying causes which make Chinese EFL Learners commit so many different types'errors of EEC. To be specific, the present study attempts to answer:1. To what extent do Chinese EFL Learners tend to commit mistakes of agreement, tense, English Existential Pseudo-relatives or to conflate"There be + NP + PP"pattern with"NP1 + have + NP2 + PP"pattern and other related problems when they use EEC in the picture description task or translation task respectively? And are there any differences between the picture description task and translation task when they use EEC?2. What cause such mistakes or difficulties for Chinese EFL Learners, and in particular, what cause the incorrect pattern of"There (be) + have + NP + PP"or the conflation between"There be + NP + PP"pattern and"NP1 + have + NP2 + PP"pattern from the cognitive standpoint?3. What cause Chinese EFL Learners to conflate Existential-have with Possessive-have from the perspective of cognitive linguistics?The main findings are: 1) Chinese EFL learners overuse ESs in the picture description task and translation task; the Existential Sentences with a clause is most difficult one for them. The frequency rate of the Existential Sentences with a clause in the picture description task is only 2.6% and the right rate of it in translation task is only 5%; the second difficult EEC's pattern for them is"PP + VP + NP"and the E-have is the third one; and their performances are different in the picture description task and translation task on the same existential pattern. 2) The incorrect pattern of"There (be) + have + NP + PP"or the conflation between"There be + NP + PP"with"NP1 + have + NP2 + PP"is quite frequently used only in the picture description task. 3) The conflation of the Existential-have sentence and the possessive-have sentence is prominent in the picture description task but very few in translation task. And the major causes for the frequent occurrences of these errors are: 1) The overuse of it is related to human being's cognition, for EC is very iconic to the process of human being's cognitive process from the Ground to the Figure; The Existential Sentences with a clause is most difficult one for them is due to the reason that the more complicated the sentence is, the more difficult it is for Chinese EFL Learners to set up a form-meaning mapping; and"PP + VP + NP"pattern is the second difficult one for them is due to the facts that low frequency of occurrence of EFL's items in the teaching materials will slow down, to a great degree, their learning process of the item and that"PP + VP + NP"pattern is an unmarked one in CEC while the marked one in EE, and the Markedness Hypothesis claims that if some grammatical items are unmarked in the mother language but marked in the target language, these items may pose difficulties for learners; the E-have is the third one is the reason that the most common function of have-construction is used to express possession, or it used to express possession directly and existence indirectly; and their performances are different in the picture description task and translation task on the same existential pattern is attributed to that the picture description is more directviewing than sentence translation, so it is easier to set up a form-meaning mapping in it. 2) The incorrect pattern of"There (be) + have + NP + PP"can be attributed to three factors from the syntactical standpoint. One is the confusion of English"There-be"construction with Chinese"You (有)"sentence; another is confusion between"There-be"construction and the existential-have construction, that is, learners have acquired that both of them can express existence but can not distinguish from each other; the last and most important one is that English E/P sentences with inanimate subjects followed by"have"cause those learners whose L1 adopts the verb"have"for both P and E to overuse it. It is also attributed to the two factors from the cognitive view. One is that the contrary between the marked one and the unmarked sentence pattern in CEC and EEC cause the difficulty of cognition, the other is due to the fact that have-construction is used to express possession directly and existence indirectly. 3) The conflation of the existential-have (有) sentence and the possessive-have (有) sentence lies in the discovery that they both of them derive from an identical symbolic structure and the only difference between them is that the"landmark"of existential-You sentence is a real search domain referring to a locative domain, while the"landmark"of the possessive-You sentence is a metaphorical one by assuming a human being as a search domain.The present study also illustrates how to distinguish English existential-have sentence from English possessive-have sentence and how to distinguish Chinese existential-have sentence from possessive-have sentence. This is beneficial to Chinese EFL Learners acquiring EEC more easily and English native-speakers learning CEC relatively smoothly.