A corpus-based study of the forms and functions of BE in the interlanguage grammars of Chinese learners of English.

摘要

The English verb BE, with its complicated forms and multiple functions, has posed great learning difficulties for learners of English both as the first and a second language. Most previous studies on the acquisition of BE have only examined a small number of participants and used data from experimental tasks, which have failed to provide a full picture of how BE is acquired and used by learners. By adopting a corpus-based approach, this study presents a fuller picture of the forms and functions of BE in the interlanguage grammars of Chinese learners of English.;Two learner corpora were used in this research, namely, Hong Kong Baptist University Interlanguage Corpus (HKBUILC) and Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), consisting of English essays written by students from Hong Kong and Mainland China, respectively. Three subcorpora of CLEC (i.e. ST2, ST3, ST4) were adopted, representing Chinese learners at three different English proficiency levels. To obtain a comprehensive distribution of interlanguage BE, all the tokens of BE, including non-target-like, overgenerated BE, as in " Mary was lost the necklace she borrowed from her friend ", and omission of BE, as in "My mother would O angry with me", were annotated with respect to their syntactic and semantic properties. The data were then retrieved type by type for examination by using WordSmith, a concordancing software.;To account for the variable use of BE in learners' interlanguage grammars, this study further investigated a few factors that may influence the production and omission of BE, such as the following linguistic distinctions: (1) copular vs. auxiliary BE; (2) finite (am, is, are, was, were) vs. nonfinite (be, being, been) BE; (3) stage-level vs. individual-level predicate types (Carlson, 1977); (4) different post-BE constituents · · e.g. ergative vs. unergative verbs (Perlmutter, 1978); and (5) the differences between L1 and L2 (i.e. English BE vs. Mandarin Shi/Cantonese Haih).;The concordancing analysis leads to a comprehensive picture of the distributional patterns of BE in Chinese-English interlanguage grammars, with detailed information on the frequencies and rates of both non-target-like and target-like uses of every form and function of BE in context. Based on this, the in-depth cross-sectional (ST2 vs. ST3 vs. ST4) and cross-varietal (ST3 vs. HKBUILC) investigations into the variable use of BE, particularly omission and overgeneration, demonstrate that there exist grammatical contingences involving all the aforementioned factors. The findings from the learner corpora are further supported by additional data from experimental tasks. Two interlanguage rules are proposed to account for omission of BE and overgeneration of BE respectively.; 1 BE→⊘/-+Asp 2 ⊘→BE/-VP It has been argued that the formulation and internalisation of such rules in the learners' mental grammars is closely related to the acquisition of the tense-aspect system and the functions of BE in Standard English. Moreover, it has been suggested that the variability of interlanguage BE results from a few factors working in tandem, such as L1 transfer, and universal mechanisms in language acquisition as captured by the Primacy of Aspect Hypothesis (e.g. Robison, 1990; Shirai, 1991).;The present investigation of interlanguage BE, especially the recurrent non-target-like BE patterns, has both theoretical and pedagogical implications. Theoretically, it shows support for the claim that interlanguage is rule-governed and is subject to grammatical constraints. More specifically, the acquisition of BE provides empirical evidence for the Aspect Hypothesis and the Multiple Effects Principle (Selinker, 1992). Pedagogically, it sheds light on the difficulties that learners may encounter and suggests some solutions to solving the problems in the acquisition of BE and its associated structures.