A Diachronic Study On The Acquisition Of English Word Stress Of English Majors From The Perspective Of Language Typological Markedness Theory

On the basis of Language Typological Markedness Theory,contrastive analysis and diachronic empirical method are employed to study the situation of English words stress of English majors through their college years.The data are word records read by students through college years.Praat is applied to find out words’ stresses according to the contours showed by the software and aids to mark the words.Then Excel is used to sort out the data and present them in tables and figures.The situations mainly include general situation of students’ four-year acquisition,mistake categories,analysis on example words’ and some students’ situations.Finally,language typological markedness theories are applied to explain situations occurring in students’ acquisition.Studies show that in general,changes on their acquisition through college years are not prominent.Therefore,software SPSS,questionnaires and interviews are employed to study the relations between their learning effects and their learning time.Anova finds that there is no prominent relations between learning effects and different grades;Questionnaires mainly show that the time they spent on word stress acquisition and their awareness of word stress play an important part in their word stress acquisition,but many students pay little attention to them;Interviews discover that their word stress perception does not agree with their word stress production and their learning environment is not good enough for word stress acquisition.In addition,it finds that mistakes made by Chinese English majors can be classified into several categories,mainly including wrongly placing stress backward,wrongly placing stress forward and wrongly exchanging primary and secondary stresses,which can be explained by language typological markedness theory.Markedness differential hypothesis is used to explain the mistakes caused by intralingual and interlingual markednesses,that is different markednesses between Chinese and English word stress rules and different markednesses within English word stress rules.As for structureconformity hypothesis,it attaches much importance to language universal rules and it is used to explain the situation occurring in their four-year English word stress acquisition.At the same time,the paper analyzes Chinese and English word stress rules from the perspective of markedness and implicational universals,and proves its applicability.The paper aims to prove the applicability of language typological markedness theory to English word stress acquisition and to explain the mistakes made by Chinese students on word stress from a new way.In addition,subjective factors,such as,teachers’ ignorance towards English word stress and students’ insufficient efforts on word stress,also influence learning effect.