A Study On English Native Speakers’ Acquisition Of Modal Verb "Yao"

Modal verb "Yao" is a basic and high-frequency word in Chinese.Its polysemy is a difficult point in learning Chinese as a second language.This study takes English native speakers as object to explore their acquisition of "Yao".Both English and Chinese modal verbs can express "dynamic","deontic" and "epistemic",which have similarity and semantic correspondence.Such cross-correspondence between mother tongue and target language will have an impact of transfer on learners.By comparing the corpus of both English and Chinese native speakers,this study aims to explore English native speakers’ use and errors of "Yao".There are spoken and written materials.The spoken materials of English speakers come from TV programs "A Bright World" and "Informal Talks";the written materials come from the HSK corpus.There are 797 and 512 data.The spoken materials of native speakers come from CCL corpus;the written materials come from Chinese literature.There are 739 and 658 data.The purpose of this paper is to objectively show the difference between English and native speakers in the use of "Yao" through the quantitative feature of corpus and to understand their acquisition from the perspective of language output.There are five chapters included.First,review previous studies on "Yao" and introduce ideas for the study and the corpus.This study focuses on analyzing English native speakers’ use of "Yao" both in spoken and written language based on their corpus and comparing their use with Chinese native speakers to find the difference or similarities in different language styles and literary forms.English native speakers’ acquisition order of "Yao" is also explored and analyzed from the perspective of cognition,learning difficulty,common use and language styles.The error analysis is mainly on English native speakers’ errors of "Yao" in the spoken language.Last is the conclusion,it summarizes that English native speakers use "Yao" differently in different styles and literary forms and puts forward teaching suggestions for each meaning.In spoken language,English speakers’ use is close to native speakers’,but they use the meaning of "should" and "require" more often and are more likely to make errors in overrepresentation,omission and negative status.In written language,English speakers use the meaning of "should" and "require" more often in argumentative writing and use "Yao" more differently in narratives from native speakers.