A Study On The Acquisition Of L2 Spatial Prepositions By Chinese-speaking Beginners Of English: A Case Study Of In And On

The present research sets out to investigate,within the framework of cognitive linguistics,the problem of how Chinese-speaking learners of English,especially those at the initial stage of L2 learning,acquire the English spatial prepositions in and on.This thesis,taking the perspective of prototypical categorization advanced by American psychologist Eleanor Rosch and her co-workers(Rosch,1973,1975;Rosch & Mervis,1975),has made a systematic comparative study of the English spatial prepositions "in" and "on" and their Chinese semantic counterparts "(zai...)li" and "(zai...)shang".The major findings yielded from this comparative study are enumerated as follows:First,in/(zai...)li typically denotes that "the trajector(TR)is partly or wholly contained in a three-dimensional landmark(LM)",while on/(zai...)shang typically indicates that "the TR is attached to the surface of,and supported by the LM".When expressing such prototypical locative relations,Chinese and English correspond with each other.Second,CONTAINMENT and SUPPORT constitute two spatial semantic categories in English and Chinese,and the prototypical cases of each category correspond with each other across the two languages. The less prototypical cases,however,diverge across the two languages in terms of spatial categorization. More precisely,while such spatial relationship as 'the TR being enclosed in a two-dimensional bounded LM' is conceptualized as CONTAINMENT in English,this same spatial scene is construed as ATTACHMENT/SUPPORT in Chinese.Third,the two spatial categories CONTAINMENT and SUPPORT form a continuum,with the prototypical members of each category locating at one end of the continuum,and the less prototypical ones lying somewhere in-between.Moreover,membership of the continuum proves to be irreversible.Based on the comparative study,and the prototype account of semantic category acquisition in particular,we put forward three research hypotheses.Two instruments were developed to empirically test these research hypotheses,namely Acceptability Judgment Task(AJT)and Translation Cloze Test(TCT). 110 Chinese EFL learners representing two English proficiency levels participated in the experiment.The results reveal that,in acquiring English spatial semantic categories CONTAINMENT and SUPPORT.Chinese EFL learners,particularly those at the initial stage of L2 development,staned from the prototypical cases of the two categories,and extended gradually to the peripheral ones.In L2 acquisition of the peripheral members of the two spatial categories,the cases that are conceptualized divergently in the L1 and the L2 were more demanding for Chinese-speaking learners of English to acquire than those that are conceptualized the same cross-linguistically.And the influence exerted by divergence in cross-linguistic categorization proved to be greater among the low-proficiency level learners than among the high-level learners.These findings empirically verify the soundness of prototype theory in predicting and explaining acquisition of L2 spatial prepositions.Two major factors constraining the acquisition of L2 spatial prepositions have been identified in this study,i.e.,the semantic prototypicality of the prepositions per se,and the convergence and divergence in spatial categorization between the L1 and the L2.In addition,the results indicate that learners' L2 spatial semantic knowledge accrues on a par with their overall L2 proficiency.