A Study Of The Impact Of Markedness On The Acquisition Of Conditional Connectives In Chinese

The current thesis takes as its research objects the Chinese learners with either English or Japanese being their mother tongue,so as to uncover the basic pattern of the acquisition of the conditional connectives in Chinese in the process of learning Chinese as a second language and explore the universal features in second language acquisition in spite of their language background.Based on the results found by the preceding researchers and the materials collected especially for this study,the cross-lingual comparison of conditional connectives is carried out,after which the markedness of conditional connective in Chinese is analyzed.It turns out that in the conditional clause,pre-connectives appearing before the predicate is marked,and appearing at the beginning of the clause is unmarked.In the resultative clause,using connectives is marked and not using is unmarked;among the two types of connectives that can be used in the resultative clause,the inferential is marked and the demonstrative is unmarked.According to these findings,the difficulty encountered by the learners in learning conditional connectives in Chinese is predicted.The language data from both Chinese leaners and Chinese native speakers is organized and analyzed in both quantitative and comparative ways in order to investigate the second language learners’ acquisition of the conditional connectives in Chinese.Firstly,obtain the language data in the following steps:search keywords and filter results.Secondly,annotate the data.For learners’ data,there are annotations in terms of the locations,the types and the errors of connectives.For native speakers’,there are annotations in terms of the locations and the types of connectives.Finally,analyze the annotated data.The actual difficulty of the acquisition is compared with the predicted one.It is showed that the marked phenomena are more difficult than the unmarked ones in the acquisition of the conditional connectives in Chinese.For both English and Japanese native speakers,the pre-connectives appearing before the predicate in the conditional clause are more difficult than the ones appearing at the beginning of the clause.For Japanese native speakers,to learn the resultative clause with connectives is more difficult than the one without connectives.For English native speakers,inferential connectives in the resultative clause are more difficult than the demonstrative ones in the resultative clause.The innovation of this research lies in two aspects.For one thing,the markedness is incorporated as a factor into the research of the acquisition of the conditional connectives in Chinese,which is a comparatively new angle to conduct research from.For another,this research conducts both quantitative and qualitative analysis on the learners’ language data,which reduce the potential errors in the analysis relying on the language intuition of native speakers.