A Study Of The Acquisition Of Chinese Full/Partial Negative Sentences Of L1 English Students

Negative expression is indispensable in human languages,and different languages have different forms of negation.Negative expressions of Chinese and English have correspondence in structure and semantics.Scholars have studied a lot in the framework of phonetics、semantics、syntax、pragmatics.These studies have made great achievements.But it’s still not enough to study certain negative sentences from L2 angles.According to full negation and partial negation,this study chooses four classic negative sentences from Chinese.Among these sentences,three contain universal quantifiers.These four negative sentences are:Chinese sentence(CS)(1)所有(的)/每个+N+都+不/没+VP,CS(2)没(一个)+N+VP,CS(3)N+不/没++所有/每个+都+VP,CS(4)不是+所有(的)/每个+N+都+VP.CS(1)and CS(2)are ffull negation,CS(3)and CS(4)are partial negation.This study also chooses four English negative sentences:English sentence(ES)(5)No/None of + N+ VP,ES(6)N+ Not+All/Both+VP,ES(7)Not+ All/Both/Every +N+VP,ES(8)All/Every+N+Not+VP.Each Chinese sentence is corresponding to an English one in structure.This dissertation aims to investigate the acquisition of Chinese full/partial negative sentences,especially those containing universal quantifiers by English speakers whose Chinese reach intermediate level.We do the study by questionnaire survey,and the main part of questionnaire consists of two parts——multiple choice and translation.The former one investigates the subjects’ cognitive competence of CS(1)、CS(2)、CS(3)、CS(4),and the latter one investigates their expression competence.There are 20 multiple choices and 9 translations.The subjects should choose the most appropriate answer and translate those English negative sentences into Chinese.Finally,I will conclude their acquisition features,explore the correlation of cognition and expression by contrasting the results of choice and translation.The results show that the acquisition of the four Chinese full/partial negative sentences is fine in general,but differential in each sentence.Generally,the acquisition of full negation is better than partial negation,the acquisition of CS(2)(almost)have no barriers in both cognition and expression.There are some problems to understand and express CS(3).To CS(4),it’s easy for the subjects to understand,but a little difficult to express.We should pay attention to CS(1).The structure of CS(1)are similar to ES(8).To ES(8),some English speakers regard it as full negation,some regard it as partial negation.Because of this,the results of CS(1)present different features,cognition and expression also have differences.However,on the whole,cognition and expression have interaction effect during the process of full/partial negative sentence acquisition.On the basis of contrast and analysis,we will try to explain the errors with transfer theory.Besides,according to the result,this dissertation will offer some advice to negative sentence teaching of L2 Chinese language.Finally,we also point out the limitation of this study and the direction of the future research.