The Acquisition Of Existential Construction Of Korean Native Speakers

The existential construction is a very special and irreplaceable structure that Chineseas the second language learner must master.Based on the existing researches of existential construction in the field of Chineselanguage, the present thesis attempts to clarify the definition standards and scope ofexistential construction, discuss the feature of the three phases composing existentialsentence. It’s different from the previous research about the acquisition of existentialconstruction of Korean native speakers, the thesis is main investigating intermediate levelor above, so we greatly expand the investigation scope, except for “you” and “V zhe”existential construction, we also investigate the other8substituted patterns of the existenceconstructions.According to questionnaires and compositions from HSK dynamic CompositionCorpus, We analyze the features of correct use of existential construction by Korean nativespeakers; analyze the types of error and investigate the causes from inter-lingualinterference and cognitive psychology. The subjects included42South Korean students,5Chinese teachers at Jeollanam-do high school,15North Korean students and27highschool students at ChangChun ethnic Korean high school. The150compositions camefrom HSK dynamic Composition Corpus and exercises in class. The investigation foundthat compared with Chinese native speaker the substituted patterns of existenceconstructions used by Korean native speaker are very limited;“you” sentence has a highuse frequency; it’s very obvious that Korean native speakers always avoid using existenceconstructions. When using the construction there are a lot of errors, such as mis-order,missing, mis-adding and misuse. The mis-order errors are mainly in choosing agent assubject as usual, choosing location phrase as adverbial, and putting the verb at the end ofthe sentence affected by Korean word order. Although the missing error is not so much, itappears at every parts of existential construction. For example, the missing of part A’s nouns of locality, the missing of part B’s verb in verb-complement construction, and themissing of part C’s modifier. We think the error is influenced bythe thinking and expressing pattern of their mother tongue. The mis-adding error is alwaysin adding “zai” or “cong” at the front of location phrase. Some subjects add prepositionbefore every existential construction, but most of them do good. As for can we add “zai”before the location phrase or not, there are different views in the existing researches ofexistential construction in the field of Chinese language. In some cases you must have thepreposition, in some cases you can’t use the preposition, and in some cases it depends onyou, using or not using both right, the difference is on pragmatics. Of course, it needs along time to learn, then use freely. The misuse errors are the most in our investigations. Wewill discuss them in the chapter4.At last, based on the error analysis, the acquisition characteristics and the use ofavoidance strategy, some suggestions about teaching the existential construction are given.