published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

by Xu Yulong. / Thesis (M.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1984 / Bibliography: leaves 170-176

Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 52).

Thesis (M.A. (Linguistics))--Mahidol University, 1984.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 272-280). Also available in electronic version.

Students learning a foreign language are apt to apply their own linguistic habits to the new language. Actually many problems of foreign language learning arise out of the interference of the learner’s first language habits. Thus modern linguists believe that a given foreign language cannot be successfully taught in an identical way to a group of students with different linguistic backgrounds. While it is true that problems of the learning of a foreign language are various, and that each of them must be attacked with a different technique, the technique of Contrastive Analysis can be universally applied in foreign language teaching. Contrastive analysis of the source language and the target language has been proved fruitful by Professor Robert Lado formerly of the University of Michigan, especially in devising tests and preparing teaching materials. This thesis, which is based upon Professor Lado’s method, is a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese basic syntactical structures, and an attempt to establish a hierachy of difficulty so as to help teachers who teach English as a second language to Chinese students. The work is confined to the syntactical level. Other levels of the formal structure of language such as the phonological level, the morphophonemic level, and the semantic level, are beyond the scope of the purpose of the paper. The analysis is presented in the transformational approach demonstrated by Noam Chomsky in "A Transformational Approach to Syntax". (See Introduction) The thesis is divided into five sections. In each section, except Section 1, descriptions and contrastive analyses of the two languages are made so that conclusions can be reached and problems of Chinese speakers learning English can be predicted. Section 1 is an introduction which explains the use of contrastive analysis, and justifies the adoption of the transformational approach. Section 2 is an illustration, by generating sentences, of the English and Chinese Phrase Structure rules. Section 3 describes the Noun Phrases in both languages. Section 4 is a discussion of the personal pronoun, while Section 5 contains a classification of English and Chinese verbs. It is hoped that this paper will be of some value for teachers who are teaching English to Chinese speakers, and also that it will provide other teachers with some insight into the values of contrastive analysis in foreign language teaching. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Noun phrases (NPs) with the same reference may take a number of different forms. For example, in English a particular conference can be referred to as a conference, the conference, that conference, this conference, that, this, or it. This dissertation attempts to account for the use of such referring expressions in Chinese, based on Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski's (1993) Givenness Hierarchy, and compares the discourse use of Chinese referring expressions with those of English.The Givenness Hierarchy is given below:THE GIVENNESS HIERARCHY:inuniquelytypefocus > activated > familiar > identifiable >referential> identifiable that{it}this{that N}{the N}{indefinite this N}{a N}this NThe Givenness Hierarchy correlates the form of referring expressions with their cognitive statuses, with each status being necessary and sufficient for the appropriate use of a different form or set of forms.The dissertation tests the Givenness Hierarchy to see if it adequately explains the use of referring expressions in Chinese. The data for this study are drawn from spoken and written texts from several different text types (cf. Biber 1986, 1988). The spoken data represent three different speech situations, i.e., face-to-face casual conversations, news broadcasts, and public speeches. The written texts represent different types, including short stories, novels, academic prose, magazine and journal articles, published letters and personal letters. The spoken and written data cover a range of formality and degree of planning.The results of the study show that the Givenness Hierarchy cannot account for the choice of form when two forms meet the sufficient cognitive requirements for appropriate use. More specifically, the Givenness Hierarchy fails to account for choices in Chinese between yi `one' NP and a bare NP when type identifiable is a necessary and sufficient condition for the appropriate use of both, or between nei `that' NP and a bare NP when uniquely identifiable is a necessary and sufficient condition for the appropriate use of both.It is proposed that within the individual categories of the Givenness Hierarchy, further distinction of the degree of discourse salience must be made in order to account for the distribution of Chinese NP forms in discourse. For example, the study shows that nei `that' encodes a uniquely identifiable referent and is used to increase referential salience, while a bare NP encodes a referent of neutral referential salience. Following Givon's (1984) line of research, the use of the numeral yi `one' is to code pragmatically important referents in discourse vs. the use of a bare NP to indicate referentially unimportant referents.To interpret the distribution of referring expressions in Chinese discourse, a number of properties of different expressions have been identified and characterized. The distal demonstrative determiner nei `that' has an associative anaphoric use, encoding an entity whose referent is uniquely identifiable based on what Hawkins (1978, 1991) calls P-sets, association sets. This function of nei as an associative anaphor demonstrates that its deictic function has become weak. In this regard, nei is beginning to function like the English definite article the.The distal demonstrative determiner nei has a recognitional use in talk-ininteraction, to use Schegloff's (1996) terms, negotiating shared knowledge and personal experiences.The demonstrative determiners zhe/na 'this/that' are studied in terms of word order variation. When in postverbal position, they function as definite markers, precluding indefinite interpretation of the postverbal NP. In preverbal position, they tend to increase referential salience of the subject/topic NP.The demonstrative pronouns are compared with the neuter pronoun to `it' and zero when referring to inanimates. The neuter to and zero tend to continue a topic, while demonstrative pronouns are likely to signal topic shift. This distinctive feature is shared by both English and Chinese.In sum, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of the use of referring expressions in both Chinese and English, which should be of interest both to linguists and to language teachers. / Department of English