A Study On Chinese Students' Acquisition Of English Verbs Of Existence From The Perspective Of Aspect

In the process of learning all the languages,verbs play an important role,and there is no exception of English learning.Among various types of verbs,English existential verb is a particular type with its own characteristics that has aroused many scholars' interest.The research mainly focuses on the unaccusativity of this kind of verb and the animacy of the subject in the sentences in which English existential verbs are involved.Nevertheless,little attention has been paid to the perspective of aspect on the acquisition.Therefore,this research aims at probing into the Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of English existential verbs from the perspective of aspect on the basis of previous studies.Two research questions are posed as follows.1.From the perspective of aspect,what are the similarities and differences in the acquisition of English Existential verbs between Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers?2,Aspectually,is Chinese EFL learner's acquisition of English Existential verbs associated to their English proficiency level?Four typical English existential verbs like die,happen,appear and exist are taken as the research subject.With the attempt to reveal the features from the perspective of aspect of Chinese learners' acquisition of English existential verbs,this thesis employ the corpora of SWECCL 2.0 and LOCNESS and then some discussions are made on the basis of data analysis.In this way,the major findings are summed up.Firstly,the greatest similarity shared by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers is that Perfective takes more part of the total grammatical aspects in punctual verbs of existence and Imperfective takes more in durative verbs of existence as a whole.Meanwhile,the difference lies in that in subdivisions of Imperfecitive,Chinese EFL learners use more Habitual than native speakers who even take no token of Habitual of punctual verbs of existence in the writings in LOCNESS which indeed reveals that Chinese learners have difficulty correctly in using of Habitual of grammatical aspects concerning the punctual verbs of existence;as for Continuous native speakers use more than Chinese learners which unveils a certain kind of difficulty for Chinese learners to acquire Continuous.In terms of the durative verbs of existence,the difference is that in the subdivisions of Imperfective,native speakers use both Habitual and Continuous less than those of Chinese EFL learners,which indicates that Chinese learners do not quite acquire the knowledge of Habitual and Continuous aspect of durative verbs of existence which may be attributed to their deficiencies of cognition about the semantic features of the durativity and stative.Secondly,in the view of grammatical aspects and tenses of the two sub-types of English existential verbs,it can be easily found that Perfective is used in highest frequency in punctual verbs of existence,Imperfective the highest in durative and simple present tense is the frequently used tense by both Chinese learners and native speakers.Besides,there exists a general tendency in these results that as the English proficiency rises from low level to high level,the frequency of using the corresponding most frequently used grammatical aspect and tense of each sub-type of verb of existence is closer to that of native speakers,which strongly proves that Chinese EFL lerners' acquisition of grammatical aspect of English existential verbs is in direct proportion to their English proficiency.The higher the English learners'proficiency is,the closer of their acquisition of the verbs is to that of native speakers.Thirdly,as the acquisition of English existential verbs is indeed a complicated cognitive mental process,there always exist some exceptions.And all the exceptions can prove that the process of language acquisition is not a fixed linear mode which only associates with the time span of the language learning and second language learning is a very complicated cognitive mental process.