Study On Chinese Students’ Acquisition Of English Demonstratives

This thesis focuses on Chinese students’ acquisition of English demonstratives this/thatand this/that+N from the perspective of language transfer. It probes into whether themarkedness degree of Chinese demonstratives’ zhe/na and zhe/na+N has any effect on theacquisition of English demonstratives this/that and this/that+N. The data are collectedfrom two sub-corpora of CLEC, ST3and ST6, the former is the CET4compositions ofnon-English major college students and the latter is TEM8compositions of English majorcollege students. Ant Conc is applied to retrieve this/that, and then every sentence with thisor that is checked to identify the use of this and that.Based on the previous studies of English and Chinese demonstratives, this papersummarizes three differences between them. Firstly, there are quantifiers in Chinesedemonstrative expressions such as zhe/na+(num)+quantifier+N, but there is no suchkind of structure in English; Secondly, Chinese is an article-less language, zhe/na+N hasthe same function as the+N has, in another word, zhe/na+N is the definite article inChinese. Thirdly, when this/this+N and that/that+N refer to people, object, event, timeor place, the uses of zhe/zhe+N and na/na+N as not-near past time demonstrative andnot-near future time demonstrative are different from those of that/that+N or this/this+N. According to the markedness criteria, the markedness of the three differences is judged.Therefore, three questions are proposed based on the Markedness Theory.(1) Willintermediate and advanced Chinese learners use the structure of zhe/na+(num)+quantifier+N in their English demonstratives learning and why?(2) Will intermediate andadvanced Chinese learners will equate the use of zhe/na+N as the+N with that ofthis/that+N and use this/that+N to replace the+N and why?(3) When intermediate andadvanced Chinese learners apply temporal demonstratives, will they consider this/this+N as zhe/zhe+N, the not-near past time demonstrative, and regard that/that+N as na/na+N, the not-near future time demonstrative as well, and why?The results indicate that intermediate and advanced Chinese learners do not employ thestructure of zhe/na+(num)+quantifier+N in their English demonstratives learning, butuse this/that+N to replace the+N and also equate that/that+N with na/na+N asnot-near future demonstrative and equate this/this+N with zhe/zhe+N as not-near pasttime demonstrative. The first and second results support the Markedness Hypothesis, andthe third one goes against it. The thesis provides a relatively reasonable satisfactoryexplanation from markedness, prototypicality, psychotypology and semantic transfer.