A Corpus-based Study On The Spatiotemporal Adverbial Word Order Distribution In Middle School Students’ English Writing And Mother Tongue Conceptual Transfer

In the field of SLA,language transfer has been concerned by many scholars.Under the influence of cognitive linguistics,Pavlenko(1998)put forward conceptual transfer,which has gradually become a new direction of language transfer research.In recent years,scholars at home and abroad have carried out a lot of researches on conceptual transfer,and have achieved fruitful results.But,most of the domestic studies stay in the description stage.Some studies explain the causes of conceptual transfer from the perspective of cognition,but the interpretation of the corpus is not sufficient,and the causes of errors can not be analyzed from the cognitive perspective.At present,there were only few conceptual transfer studies on the word order distribution of temporal and spatial adverbials of Chinese students.And there is little research on the conceptual transfer of temporal and spatial adverbials word order distribution in middle school students’ English writing.Therefore,this study intends to investigate the influence of mother tongue cognitive habits through the self-build corpus on the word order distribution of second language temporal and spatial adverbials from the perspective of conceptual transfer.Then,explore the mechanism of mother tongue transfer on spatiotemporal adverbial word order distribution.The research questions are as follows: 1)What are the characteristics of spatiotemporal adverbial word order distribution in English writing of middle school students? 2)What are the differences in the spatiotemporal adverbial word order distribution in English writing among the three groups of students with different grades? 3)How does conceptual transfer affect the spatiotemporal adverbial word order distribution in English writing of middle school students? In order to answer the above three research questions,the author systematically studies the spatiotemporal adverbial word order distribution in middle school students’ English writing under conceptual transfer theory and connectionnism theory,and analyzes how does conceptual transfer affect the word order distribution of spatiotemporal adverbial in middle school students’ English writing.The findings are as follows: first,the word order distribution of temporal adverbials in middle school students’ English compositions shows a tendency of pre-position,which is closer to the Chinese word order,but has significant differences with the target language order.The tendency of spatial adverbials shows postposition,which is closer to the target language order.Second,for different grades,spatiotemporal adverbials have no significant difference in pre-position and the middle of sentences,but in postposition and wrong usage,there are significant differences among three grades.It can be found that the postposition word order of the senior two students is closer to the target word order,and the use of the spatiotemporal adverbials in the senior two is better than senior one and junior three.It shows that it is easier for senior students to jump out of Chinese word order thinking and approach the target word order,while the lower grade students are more vulnerable to the conceptual negative transfer.Third,conceptual transfer has a strong explanatory power for spatiotemporal adverbial word order acquisition.On the one hand,the overall acquisition of temporal and spatial adverbials in Chinese learners is better,which is to a large extent the result of conceptual positive transfer,because English and Chinese spatial and temporal dimensions of cognition have commonalities.This commonality is manifested as conceptual positive transfer in SLA and promotes the second language temporal and spatial adverbial word order acquisition.On the other hand,Chinese learners have different degrees of errors in the overall acquisition of English spatiotemporal adverbials,which is directly related to the conceptual negative transfer,because the spatiotemporal dimensions cognition of the two languages is also different.This causes cognitive difficulties to learners and hinders the second language spatiotemporal adverbial word order acquisition.Based on the research results and conceptual transfer theory,this study puts forward some related teaching suggestions for middle school English spatiotemporal adverbials teaching.Finally,the limitations of this study and the suggestions for the future researches will be put forward.