The Role Of Grammaticalization In The Acquisition Of English Articles By Mandarin-speaking Learners:The Verification Of The Semantic Fluctuation Hypothesis

The acquisition of English articles is an important issue in the field of second language acquisition. Various linguistic theories have been established to account for this phenomenon, but few of them has provided a satisfactory explanation so far due to the diversity and the complexity of article use on both semantic and pragmatic levels.Ionin (2003) brought up the Semantic Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) in an attempt to provide a universal theoretical framework on the acquisition of English articles for learners of different mother tongues. The FH proposed two important semantic parameters in the systems of articles across different languages in the world:definiteness and specificity. The acquisition of articles is the process of correct resetting of these semantic parameters by learners. Ionin (2003) also emphasized that this process is to a large extent influenced by the mother tongues of learners. If the learner’s mother tongue doesn’t have an article system, then the setting choices of the learner will fluctuate between two semantic parameters until adequate linguistic input leads the learner to the correct choice. The Fluctuation Effect is manifested by the article substitution between a and the in the performance of the learners’article use. The FH has attracted great attention and has been revised for several times since its proposal. The most updated version of the FH was proposed by Ko (2009) who incorporated a new semantic parameter:presuppositionality. Because the FH is intended to establish a universal theoretical framework on the acquisition of articles across various languages, the reliability of the FH is dependent on the tests on learners of different mother tongues.So far the FH has been validated for Korean and Japanese learners, but it seems not to fit well for Chinese learners. The outcomes of previous related studies vary greatly and no reliable conclusion can be drawn. Thus the present study is intended to retest the Semantic Fluctuation Hypothesis on Chinese learners of English articles and tries to provide a satisfactory explanation on the results. The results show that the Fluctuation Effect is not remarkable on the tests of Chinese learners. However, on closer look it is found that the results do not lead to the disconfinmation of this theory but reveal another possibility: though there is no article system in Chinese, some Chinese demonstratives like "zhe" and "na" have been grammaticalized to articles in some situations. Chinese learners may consider the English article the as the grammaticalized Chinese demonstratives zhe and na in the process of acquisition, which helps them set the correct semantic parameters. This explanatory hypothesis is examined by a translation complete task and the results show Chinese learners can clearly distinguish the grammaticalized Chinese demonstratives and the ungrammaticalized ones. Thus the present study claims that the lack of Fluctuation Effect with the Chinese learners does not disapprove the Semantic Fluctuation Hypothesis. Rather it verifies the FH in that the correct setting of article semantic parameters among Chinese learners is the result of the effect of grammaticalization of Chinese demonstratives to articles.