A Study On The Acquisition Of Functional Category T By Chinese Learners Of English

Compared with the L1acquisition, few adult L2learners can acquire L2successfully, that is to say,there is a general failure among adult L2learners. In recent years, it has been found that L2learnerssometimes use morphological inflections and sometimes omit them on thematic verbs, which has arousedconsiderable interest from researchers in the field of SLA. Does the morphological variability imply thatthe functional categories, associated features and feature strength in syntactic system are impaired? Theviews of researchers fall into two camps:“Impaired camp” and “Unimpaired camp”. According to the“Impaired camp”, the morphological variability can reflect that the syntactic system in interlanguagegrammar is impaired, with the functional categories, associated features and feature strength lacking or“inert” or valueless. On the contrary, the “unimpaired camp” claims that the morphological variability doesnot necessarily imply that the syntactic system in interlanguage grammar is impaired. Rather, the L2learners’ may have a problem with the “mapping” from the abstract functional categories or features to thesurface morphologies.This study aims to examine whether the interlanguage grammar is impaired or not by investigatingChinese-speaking learners’ acquisition of the cluster features of functional category T in English within MPframework. At the same time, this study also examines the UG access issue and further investigates therelationship between the morphology system and syntactic system. Through examining the data collectedfrom Chinese learners of English at three different proficiencies with SPSS software as statistical tool andANOVA as analysis method, the results are as follows: although Chinese learners of English often omit themorphological inflections on thematic verbs, they indeed distinguish the finite verb forms from nonfiniteones, since they rarely use finite verb forms in nonfinite positions and they place the negators, VP-adverbsto the left side of thematic verbs. Moreover, the finite clauses have subjects and the subjects are nominativecase. The results of this study suggest that although L2learners omit many morphological inflections onthematic verbs, the syntactic system in their interlanguage grammar is unimpaired, and the functionalcategories, associated features and feature strength and the feature-checking mechanism still function wellin interlanguage grammar. The results also indirectly demonstrate that UG is still available in L2 acquisition.This thesis further explores the reasons of morphological deficiency and puts forward somesuggestions for language teaching. At the end of this thesis, the limitations of this study and suggestions forfurther study are given.