An Examination Of The Interlanguage Grammar Impairment Hypothesis: Based On The Chinese English Learners' Acquisition Of Functional Categories T, C And D

The development of functional categories in interlanguage system has been frequently discussed by the second language researchers in recent years. It's common that second language learners use functional categories sometimes, but omit them at other times. Some learners even neglect them in the early period of learning a target language, and this phenomenon seems to be persistent in the whole process of second language acquisition. Whether the omission of functional categories suggests impairment of the learners'interlanguage system is a problem to be debated.Recently, the Minimalist Program has provided a new perspective on second language research. Broadly speaking, there are two opposite accounts of the optional use of morphology in SLA, the Impaired Functional Representation (IFR) and the Full Functional Representation (FFR). The former one suggests that the functional categories and its associated features are impaired, either local or global. Second language learners can not make full use of functional categories which causes the failure of second language learning. On the other hand, FFR argue that functional categories can not result the failure of second language acquisition.Within the Minimalist Program, this thesis analyses the data collected from the Chinese EFL (English as a foreign Language) learners by the functional categories T (Tense), C (Complimenizer) and D (Determiner) to investigate the potential relationship between morphology and syntax in second language, that is, whether L2 learners'persistent morphological problems imply the impairment of interlanguage syntactic system. With the data collected from 120 Chinese-speaking English learners in Si Chuan International Studies University, SPSS (16.0) and One-way ANOVA are also used in this investigation to process and analyze the data. The results show:(i) According to the analysis and discussion of the relevant data, the acquisition of functional category T in preliminary level supports the Impaired Functional Representation (IFR), but much evidence has been obtained to support the Full Functional Representation (FFR) in acquisition of functional categories C and D. Evidence are both given to the IFR and FFR, so it is hard to say whether the two representations are right or wrong.(ii) Chinese EFL learners at different English proficiency levels vary in their dependence upon the knowledge of functional categories in the use of English, sometimes they may overuse or omit them, but the advanced group does much better in the tests and their performance approach that of native speakers.Some other findings are presented after analysis about the reason of omitting functional categories, the effect of native language and other factors should be considered.At the end of the article, some limitations are pointed out and some suggestions for language teaching are put forward.