A Study On The Meanings And Acquisition Of The Chinese Adverb "Zai"

"Zai" is a common adverb in modern Chinese which is not only frequently used, but also contains diverse meanings as well as usages. Therefore, the acquisition of "zai" has also become an obstacle in the teaching and learning of Chinese as a second language. Existing studies, including those focusing on syntactic, pragmatic as well as acquisition and pedagogic characteristics of "zai", still bear some defects. The most obvious is the controversy over the division and generalization of the different meanings of "zai". Due to this lack of consensus in meanings, syntactic, pragmatic, acquisition and pedagogic studies are also wanting in a clear semantic framework on which to build the researches, thus in a isolated and unsystematic state. Besides, studies that are based on the statistics and analysis of real corpus so that can reflect the true profile of language in use are yet hard to find.This study has taken the meanings of "zai" in modern Chinese as the subject of research. First, we carried out statistics and analysis of a language specimen of native users from corpus. Through this way, we came up with seven distinct meanings of "zai". Adopting theoretical methods of "semantic frame" and "semantic feature analysis", we tried to give a full description of the "core" of every meaning, along with the relationships between different meanings. As a result, we managed to construct a meaning system of "zai". Moreover, according to the corpus research, usages of each meaning that possess the highest communicative values have been sorted out and given descriptions of their formal features and pragmatic functions.Taking the conclusion of the meaning system of "zai" as a foundation, we continued to analyze language specimen from a corpus of compositions written by students of Chinese as a second language. We observed the appearance of different meanings, analyzed their distribution and compared these results with those of the native language users’ specimen. We hope the facts found and the differences shown could offer a comprehensive and authentic picture of the extent to which most learners of Chinese as a second language have acquired this adverb at present, and perhaps the conclusions of this study might help to promote the teaching and learning process as well.