The Language Bias Of The Negative Usage Of Chinese Modal Verbs By Foreigner Students

With the rapid development of social economy in China, theinter-communication between different countries in the world is becoming more andmore frequent. More and more foreigners are getting enthusiastic about Chinese andpursue study in China. Given this situation, it is a vital issue in Chinese-teaching as aforeign language that how to make overseas students learn Chinese in a more efficientway.Modal verbs are frequently used in communication in Chinese. Overseasstudents are prone to misunderstand and consequently to misuse the negative form ofmodal verb, because the affirmative and negative form are not in one-to-onecorrespondence. It has become a bottleneck of overseas students to learn andcommunicate better in Chinese. Taking this situation into consideration, this articleconducts research on errors in using the negative form of modal verb. This researchenables overseas students to gain a better understanding of and to master the negativeforms of modal verb. It would contribute to boost teaching quality and to improve theexisting textbooks of Chinese teaching as a foreign language.After summarizing the existing researches on the negative form of modal verb,we find out that it is hard to directly apply those research findings of noumenon toChinese-teaching as a foreign language. As a result, they are of little instructivesignificance. Therefore, this article firstly makes analysis on the reason and certainrules of the asymmetry of the affirmative and negative form of modal verb using theaffirmation and negation axiom of natural language, so as to ascertain the semanticitem of the negative form of modal verb and make a further illustration for somespecial performance such as the “un-” and “no” usage and the usage of negativeforms of potential complement and negative forms of modal verb, etc; and thenclassify the ungrammatical sentences about the negative forms of modal verb in“HSK dynamic composition corpus” with statistical method, summarizes error typesand analyzes error causes. Finally, this article puts forward some teaching strategiesas for the generating errors. Through the research of this article, firstly it confirms theoretically the cause andrules of such non-correspondence, that is, the semantic level changes leading tochanges of affirmative-negative correspondence. This enables teachers to have accessto relative theories to adopt when dealing with teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Secondly, this article sums up the error types of the negative forms generated in theprocess of Chinese-learning of overseas students and analyzes several phrases of higherror frequency. Finally, this article puts forward specific suggestions in teaching andcourse books that teachers should enhance teaching in context and emphasizeexplanation of the words that students often misuse. Meanwhile, in the course booksthe negative forms of modal verb should also be emphasized and the semantic itemsshould be appropriately classified in the explanation of grammar. Furthermore, thetransition between the affirmative form and negative form should also be illustratedand enough examples should be provided.Hopefully through the researches of this article, the importance of the negativeforms of modal verb could be recognized and it is of great instructive significance inChinese-teaching as a foreign language.