A Study Of The Effects Of Prototypicality And Degree Of Cross-linguistic Equivaience On Chinese EFL Learners’ Use Of In —From The Persnective Of Concentuai Transfer

The studies of L2 learners’ acquisition of English spatial prepositions reveal that learners tend to erroneously expand or narrow the semantic categories of prepositions. This motivates the exploration of the cognitive factors affecting the acquisition of prepositions within the framework of cognitive linguistics. Of the factors under investigation, L1 transfer receives much attention because of the language specificity in spatial categorization. But studies of L1 transfer are primarily concerned with the semantic or conceptual representations of prepositions to the neglect of the fact that semantic and conceptual representations of prepositions are always the mappings of the categories of objects involved in the spatial relations, especially the reference objects. For instance, in representing the spatial relation between the plate and the apple as illustrated in the sentence "There is an apple____ the plate", which preposition, between in and on, is used by speakers is largely determined by whether the object plate is categorized as a container or a supporting surface. Then for learners of English as a foreign language, does such categorization also affect their use of English spatial prepositions? Does it constitute the mechanism facilitating or inhibiting L1 transfer in learners’acquisition of prepositions? The exploration of the questions will be contributory to revealing the conceptual mechanism of L1 transfer in the acquisition of English relational predicates.According to prototype theory, categories of reference objects involve two dimensions:(1) Prototypicality of objects as members in a specific spatial category; (2) Cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the categories of reference objects. Based on this, the dissertation, taking the spatial preposition in as an example, is intended to empirically investigate how prototypicality of members of the CONTAINER category and degree of equivalence in the CONTAINER category between English and Chinese affect the use of in by Chinese learners of English as a foreign language to uncover the conceptual mechanism of L1 transfer in the use of English spatial prepositions by L2 learners.To start with, a theoretical justification of the dependency of L2 learners’use of in on the CONTAINER category is made within the framework of cognitive grammar and connectionist approach to bilingual conceptual representation. It reveals that the use of in is conceptually dependent on whether the schematic container profiled by in is elaborated by the object concept profiled by the noun, which is the product of categorization of the object serving as the reference point. As far as English natives are concerned, the elaborative distance is defined by the prototypicality of reference objects specific to English. However, for learners of English as a second language, the elaborative distance tends to be determined by both prototypicality of containers and the degree of cross-linguistic equivalence in the CONTAINER category.For the purpose of establishing English-based prototype concept of CONTAINER and identifying the degrees of equivalence in the CONTAINER category between English and Chinese, a preliminary study is conducted. Firstly, on the basis of previous studies, the instances of the CONTAINER category are divided into seven types in terms of prototypicality related to the different uses of in. Secondly, a corpus-based cross-linguistic comparison of the CONTAINER category between English and Chinese is undertaken. The data containing the composite structure [IN +N] and its corresponding Chinese expressions are extracted from the parallel corpus General Chinese-English Parallel Corpus (GCEPC) and are analyzed in the light of two monolingual corpora:British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Chinese Language (CCL). Based on the comparative study of the object concepts profiled by English nouns and their corresponding Chinese expressions, the degree of cross-linguistic equivalence in construing containers falls into six levels ranging from full equivalence to zero equivalence.Following this is the empirical investigation of the effects of prototypicality and the degree of equivalence on the use of in by Chinese learners of English. A preposition test is designed to elicit learners’use of in in accordance with the above two classificatory frameworks established in the preliminary study. In addition, the data for the occurrence of L1 transfer are collected through four types of comparisons (a comparison of learner data in a given context, a comparison between learner data and the corresponding L1 data, a comparison between learner data across the degrees of equivalence and a comparison between learner data and native data) and a retrospective interview.150 Chinese learners of English who are classified into three proficiency groups (with 50 participants in each) are recruited in the research. The research questions are as follows:(1) How does prototypicality of members of the CONTAINER category affect learners’use of the English spatial preposition in?(2) How does prototypicality effect change with the increase of L2 proficiency?(3) How does the degree of cross-linguistic equivalence in the CONTAINER category affect learners’use of the English spatial preposition in?(4) How does the effect of the degree of cross-linguistic equivalence change with the increase of L2 proficiency?The major findings of the study are as follows:Firstly, both prototypicality and the degree of equivalence are confirmed to affect learners’ use of in. But the results of variation in the use of in across different prototypical contexts and different degrees of equivalence show that the degree of equivalence in the CONTAINER category is more important in motivating the use of in. As the degree of equivalence declines, negative transfer from L1-specificobject concepts increases.Secondly, for the change in the effects of prototypicality and the degree of equivalence on learners’use of in with the increase of L2 proficiency, prototypicality effect is found to be strengthened as learners’L2 proficiency increases and inhibits negative transfer to some extent. But prototypicality effect still works under the constraint of the degree of equivalence, because only when the prototypical contexts are of similar degree of equivalence, the use of in for advanced learners exhibits a linear variation. As to the change in the effect of the degree of equivalence, the variation across different proficiency groups in the use of in reveals that as L2 proficiency improves, the positive effect of the higher degrees of equivalence increases linearly and the negative effect of the lower degrees of equivalence decreases linearly. But a comparison of advanced learners’use of in across different degrees of equivalence shows that even advanced learners suffer a lot from the negative transfer of L1-specific object concepts in the case of lower degrees of equivalence.The above findings reveal that the degree of cross-linguistic equivalence in the CONTAINER category constitutes the conceptual mechanism of L1 transfer in the use of spatial prepositions by L2 learners. This highlights the importance of the conceptual construal of the nouns in learners’ use of English spatial prepositions and has significant theoretical implications for the studies of conceptual mechanism of L1 transfer in acquisition of other relational predicates and practical implications for teaching English as a foreign language as well.