Research On Foreign Students’ Acquisition Of Chinese Causal Conjunctions

There are a large proportion of causal conjunctions in Chinese conjunctions As a part of conjunctions, they play an important role in discourse cohesion. At present, plenty works have been done on ontology research. However the research is not enough in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and almost every nation has some words that indicate causal logic, so teachers often overlook the deep explanations of causal conjunctions. The causal conjunction is a difficult and key point for foreign students. This study is an preliminary research on foreign students’ acquisition of Chinese causal conjunctions. The paper defines the scope of Chinese causal conjunctions, which are "cong’er(从而)、gu(故)、suoyi(所以)、yizhi<yu>(至<于>)、yizhi(以致)、 yinci(因此)、yin’er(因而)、yinwei(因为)、youyu(由于)、 yushi(于是)、zhisuoyi(之所以)、zhishii(致使)、jiran(既然)、kejian(可见)”.In order to find the difference between one condition that a causal conjunction is used alone in a sentence and another that causal conjunctions are used in the same sentence, we not only investigate "yinwei(因为)"、"youyu(由于M)"but also investigate"yinwei(因为)......suoyi(所以)......"and"youyu(由于)......suoyi(所以)......".The paper is divided into five parts:The first part describes the background, the significance, the corpus sources, the methods and the ideas of the research. In the second part, we summarize the ontology research and the research in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. In ontology research, the case study and associated words of causal conjunctions study are sufficient.The systematic study on the acquisition of Chinese causal conjunctions is deficient. In the third part, through quantitative statistical analysis and error analysis, we determine the types of errors that with causal conjunctions of foreign student include omission error, addition error, error generation, the wrong sequence and blend error. The error generation is the largest proportion. The reasons of these errors including the negative impacts from mother language transfer, the knowledge of target language negative transfer, the impact of language learning environment and so on. In the fourth part, based on the usage rate, the correct usage rate and the correct usage of relative frequency of every causal conjunction, compared with native speakers and combined with the subjective consciousness investigation on every causal conjunction of foreign students,we construct the acquisition order of causal conjunctions:suoyi(所以f)—yinci(因此)—yinwei(因为)—yinwei......suoyi......(因、youyu(由于)、yushi(于是)youyu......suoyi......(yin’er(因而)—jiran(可见)-zhisuoyi(之所)—yyzhi(以致)—yizhi<yu>(以至<于>)—zhishi(致使)。The fifth part gives some suggestions on arrangement, teaching and exercises of causal conjunction according to the difference of the acquisition order.The characteristics of this study are:The ontology research on Chinese causal conjunctions is sufficient, However, the systematic study on the acquisition of Chinese causal conjunctions is deficient. According to the situation, we study on foreign students’ acquisition of Chinese causal conjunctions systematically.Compared with the native speakers,the paper discovers the overuse and the underuse.of the causal conjunctions. Analyze corpus and the subjective consciousness investigation on causal conjunctions of foreign students, and combined with the analysis method of frequency domain, we get the acquisition order...