Articles and proper names in L2 English (Chinese).

摘要

It is well known that learners of English as a second language have difficulty using articles, especially if their first language does not contain an article system of its own (Kharma 1981, Huebner 1983a. 1983b, 1985, Parrish 1987, Tarone 1985, Aaronson & Ferres 1987, Master 1987, Tarone & Parrish 1988, Johnson & Newport 1989, Thomas 1989, Yoon 1993, Young, 1996, Murphy, 1997, Butler, 1999, Robertson, 2000, Ionin & Wexler, 2002, lonin 2003). However, these studies have only analyzed article accuracy with common nouns; there has been no systematic investigation into the use of articles with proper names in English by nonnative speakers.; Proper names present an interesting challenge to second language learners. Both common nouns and proper names appear with articles in English. However, the distribution of articles is not the same across the two classes. With common nouns, the use of the definite, indefinite and zero articles conveys information about the pragmatic definiteness of the referent of the NP in which the articles appear. The use of articles with proper names, on the other hand, is non-contrastive; certain classes of proper names take the definite article in all contexts, while others appear bare in all contexts.; I use experimental and semi-naturalistic data from 20 adult speakers of Mandarin who are learning English as a second language to investigate the use of articles with proper names in L2 English. I argue that nonnative speakers of English whose first language lacks articles show significantly lower levels of accuracy with proper names than with common nouns. I also claim that nonnative speakers are sensitive to the morphosyntactic structure of proper names, and that this structure may influence their choice of articles with certain classes of referents. I also present evidence that the current methods of evaluating the speech of nonnative speakers for article accuracy potentially eliminate a large proportion of article contexts from analysis, and that this exclusion of data can impact the calculation of accuracy in article production.