Chinese L2ers'acquisition Of English Space And Time Adjuncts Influenced By Subset Principle

This thesis focuses on the study of Chinese learners'acquisition of English space and time adjuncts (s/t adjuncts) in the view of the Subset Learning Principle (SLP). Most Chinese students observe hypotheses about English syntax based on their strictly instructed knowledge of English and Chinese grammar rules. And most scholars advocate the transfer hypothesis for that. However, this thesis tends to address language acquisition from the SLP rather than overusing the transfer view and states that Chinese learners will choose the most restrictive expressions, i.e. the initial position of the English s/t adjuncts in their production and transfer the patterns of Chinese without violation of English construction. Adjunct phrase is, according to Chomsky's, an optional and flexible syntactic component, which further explains the difficulty for Chinese learners in English adjuncts acquisition.The present paper is an empirical study based on literature review and data collection and analysis.3groups on different levels of English were asked to finish the Grammaticality Judgment Test and Translation Tasks. The ANOVA analysis and paired-samples T-test are made by using the software SPSS (13.0version) to do the statistic analysis. Two weeks later, after a pre-instruction on how to use English adjuncts by the observation of subset principle, they did another Translation Test. The conclusion is that Chinese students obey the SLP in acquiring English space and time adjuncts. They firstly select ranking order of s/t adjuncts which are available positions for Chinese as a subset. The ranking is that the core and subset one is the initial position, then the mediate position, and the end position. The thesis aims to account for the phenomenon by the SLP instead of the prevailingly adopted transfer theory. It is expected that the acquisition of English s/t adjuncts is improved and bettered through the interference of explicit instruction of which the function is to facilitate Chinese Learners of English to be well conscious of the positions of English s/t adjuncts.