Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Introduction
The acquisition of English inflectional morphology related to functionalcategories poses a problematic difficulty for Chinese learners. They show variabilityin outputting functional inflections associated with tense and agreement and casuallyomit or wrongly use them in their oral English. Meanwhile, this difficulty persistsduring their whole procedure of acquisition and becomes a bottleneck regardless oftheir L2 proficiency. Researchers at home and abroad study on this issue and theirresearch results differ. They explain this issue from different angles. Generallyspeaking, researchers explain it from perspectives of linguistic typology, L2er‘smorpho-syntactic system, L1 transfer, L2er‘s cognitive stage and so on. Some of themexplain this failure from a morpho-syntactic angle and owe it to a deficiency in L2ers'IL grammar. They find that adult L2ers have difficulty in acquiring TL functionalmorphology which is absent in their L1. Therefore, they argue that L2ers are lack TLmorpho-syntactic representation in their TL grammar system (Tsimpli andRoussou1991; Hawkins and Chan 1997; Hawkins 2000, 2001; Hawkins and Liszka2003; Tsimpli 2003). According to their explanation, adult L2ers whose L1 lacksfunctional features as agreement and tense cannot acquire these features in their TLgrammar system and, consequently, are unable to supply the relevant functionalinflections overtly. While, another group of researchers disagree and claim that L2ersactually can fully acquire L2 syntactic representations in their TL grammar and theirvariability in production is attributed to the difficulty in mapping betweenmorphological and syntactic levels, or in accessing certain forms from the lexicon(Hazenadar and Schwartz 1997.
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1.2 Background and purpose of this thesis
Recently, it occurs a brand-new stance for us to study acquisition problemswhich is called the interface study. Explanations and predictions of developmentaldelays, regression, or inability to reach native-like attainment in specific areas ofgrammatical knowledge have been linked to the architecture of the language faculty,and the guiding theme has been ―interface (Montrul 2011). Interface study isrelatively new in acquisition research but has aroused much attention. It viewsacquisition as an integrative process between different modules of target language andprovides a new method for us to investigate linguistic phenomena occurring in L2acquisition.In this thesis, we conduct our experiment on Chinese L2ers‘ output on Englishsimple past tense inflections based on morphology-phonology interface and byapplying the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis. And we concentrate on the analysis ofunderlying reasons behind their oral omission by employing a phonology-morphologyview. That is to say, we investigate into the prosodic structures in TL and L1 andL2ers' acquisition of regular and irregular verbal inflections. In literature review, weintroduce the discrepancy between researchers‘ experiment data and, based on theirstudy, put forth two research hypotheses. Writing and oral tasks are used in theexperiment to answer and testify them. By analyzing and discussion, we in the endwould harvest major findings of the thesis. Some implications for L2 pedagogicalmethods are offered under the guidance of the experiment data.
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Chapter Two Literature review
2.1 Introduction
As outlined in Chapter One, in this chapter our focus is on an explicit review onprevious research and hypotheses about the invariability of verbal inflection in L2er‘sproduction. Generally speaking, three kinds of approaches are proposed by foreignscholars on this issue and under each approach they build a solid theoretical base insupport of their view. And among these approaches and theories, the third approach isadopted and studied in our study in this thesis. After the introduction to foreignapproaches and theories abroad, we will also mention about some theoretical views athome.
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2.2 Previous research and hypotheses
As a vital functional category in English, tense has been a major problem toChinese L2ers. Much evidences show that Chinese L2ers frequently omit verbalinflections for past tense in their speeches regardless of L2ers‘ different L1backgrounds and L2 proficiency. Sentences like Last year Jim buy a car or Yesterdayhe walk home can be commonly found in Chinese L2ers‘ output. A considerableamount of research has been conducted on this problem and there are generally threekinds of explanations. They are respectively the impaired functional representationview, the full functional representation view and a L1-constraint phonological view.
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Chapter Three A comparison between English verbal morphology...........17
3.1 Introduction....17
3.2 Definitions of aspect and tense ......17
3.3 Tense and aspect in English and Chinese.......18
3.4 The prosodification of past morphology........22
3.5 Summary ........30
Chapter Four Methodology........31
4.1 Introduction....31
4.2 Hypotheses .....32
4.3 Test design......33
4.4 Summary ........38
Chapter Five Results, analysis and discussion ..........39
5.1 Introduction....39
5.2 Experimental results.......40
Chapter Five Results, analysis and discussion
5.1 Introduction
The question we investigate in this thesis is about Chinese L2er‘s output on pastverbal inflections and their variability and errors in producing them. White (2011)proposes that this kind of acquisition problem is related and can be studied on thephonology-morphology interface. Recalling the hypotheses in the previous chapter,we assume that L1-constraint prosodic structure plays an important role in ILproduction. Apart from defective IL system, L2ers‘ failure to output tense features isattributed by the transfer of 1L‘s prosodic structure. Therefore, for Chinese-speakingL2ers of English at different level, they show higher accuracy in using past tensemarking in written context than in spoken context. Secondly, due to the similaritybetween English irregular inflection and Chinese aspect in prosodic structure, wehypothesize that this similarity triggers positive transfer on Chinese L2ers andChinese-speaking L2ers of English at all levels should show higher suppliance rate ofirregular inflections than regular ones. Thirdly, we will also investigate into theinfluence of L1‘s prosodic constraint on final consonant cluster on L2ers‘ IL output.Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic and forbid consonant clusters at the end of thesyllables. While the affixation of past tense marking in English sometimes causeswords ending in consonant clusters. So we hypothesize that L1‘s prosodic constrainson final consonant cluster will affect L2er‘s acquisition of past morphology and leadto difficulty in outputting past morphology in their IL production. The hypothesesmentioned above need further testifying and analyzing under the real statistical data ofthe experiment employed here. In this chapter results of the experiment are presentedwith the help of all the subjects.
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Conclusion
Our study results can offer some pedagogical implications for current Englishteaching in learning in China.First of all, from our experimental results we find that our Chinese students aremore proficient in writing than speaking. It reflects our current teaching style in China.Our traditional style of learning and teaching English is repeatedly memorizing words,acquiring grammatical rules, discussing in groups. Chinese students mechanicallyfollow this traditional teaching style and their major motivation is getting high scorein English tests. In this thesis, we are informed that oral output constitutes a moredifficult obstacle for Chinese students, therefore when learning –ed in past tenseChinese students should put more attention on oral production. In classroom teachersshould create a much real circumstance for students to practice oral English and putspeaking and listening as two important targets and test criterion when teachinginflectional morphology.
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Reference (omitted)