A Study Of Interlanguage Syntactical Features Of Native English-speaking Chinese Learners Based On Dependency Grammar

The term “interlanguage” is an important concept in language studies,first introduced by L.Selinker in 1969,more than 50 years ago.Interlanguage is seen as a unique linguistic system formed by second language learners,with its own system.Early qualitative studies of interlanguage with examples were more frequent,and although empirical studies have increased in recent years,most of them focus on specific linguistic phenomena,and less on the syntactic features of interlanguage as a whole.This study bases on dependency grammar,using two indicators,mean dependency distance and dependency direction,to analyze the interlanguage syntactical features of native English-speaking Chinese learners.Based on a self-built corpus of 74,359 words of interlanguage,we attempt to explore the following three questions:(1)What are the characteristics and trends of the mean dependency distance of Chinese interlanguage at each of the three levels: elementary,intermediate and advanced,as the Chinese learners’ level continues to improve?(2)What are the characteristics and trends of the dependency direction of Chinese interlanguage at each of the three levels: elementary,intermediate and advanced?(3)What are the characteristics of the overall development of the interlanguage as the level of Chinese learners increases?The study finds that:(1)As the level of Chinese learners increases,the overall mean dependency distance,the subject mean dependency distance,the object mean dependency distance,the adverbial mean dependency distance and the attribute mean dependency distance all tend to move closer to the target language.The mean dependency distance of elementary learners differed from that of intermediate learners and advanced learners in terms of the overall mean dependency distance and the mean dependency distance of the object language.Advanced Chinese learners showed significant differences in the mean dependency distance of the adverbial and the mean dependency distance of attribute.Besides,we found that the proportion of adverbial with a mean dependency distance of 1 was highest among the elementary learners,indicating that the elementary learners were more fixed in their use of adverbial.Secondly,advanced learners have the lowest mean dependency distance of 1,which shows that advanced learners are more flexible in their use of Chinese determiners.(2)As learners’ level increases,the distribution of head-initial in the overall dependency direction and attribute dependency direction increased.In addition,the proportion of head-final in the subject dependency direction and object dependency direction decreases as learners’ proficiency increases.In general,there is a tendency to move closer to the target language.From a linguistic typology point of view,the interlanguage is an OV-structured language according to the proportion of object dependency directions.From the perspective of dependency grammar,the interlanguage is also a hybrid language with a slight predominance of head-final.(3)Based on the mean dependency distance and dependency direction,the interlanguage exhibits the characteristics of inaccessibility to the target language,progressivity and dynamicity,which is consistent with previous studies.This paper introduces dependency grammar to study Chinese interlanguage in a quantitative way,which helps to understand the characteristics of interlanguage in a more scientific and detailed way,and also helps to comprehensively understand the process of second language acquisition.