An Empirical Study On Chinese EFL Learners’ Linguistic And Conceptual Transfer In Anger Expression

Emotional expression is an important part of daily communication,helping people conveys feelings and attitudes toward people or things.Anger is one of the basic emotions,so this paper takes the expression of "anger" as the research object,and set linguistic and conceptual metaphors differences from previous studies as presuppositions,and adopted the research paradigm of Russian scholar Pavlenko;then based on language transfer theory and conceptual metaphor theory,the author researched the following three questions from linguistic and cognitive perspective:(1)Is there any linguistic transfer of EFL learners in anger expression?(2)Is there any conceptual transfer of EFL learners in anger expression?(3)Do different context of situations influence EFL learners’ anger expression?The participants of this study are 40 English major students from NWNU,who have passed TEM 8,and had systematic knowledge of English.Besides,four native speakers who come from America also attend the experiment.The research materials selected are two groups of pictures from English situation cartoon When Sophie Gets Angry,and Chinese situation cartoon The Wanderings of Sanmao.The participants were divided into two groups according to different situations and each group of 20 students.All the participants need to finish productive writing task,verbal fluency task and questionnaire.In data analysis,the stories written in productive writing will be the main data of this research,and the data of verbal fluency task and questionnaire will be assistant part.The analysis will focused on sentence patterns and conceptual metaphors used in productive writing,and then the author will judge is there any linguistic and conceptual transfer in EFL learners’ anger expression,and furthermore,the author will analyze the influence of different situations on EFL learners’ anger expression from the sentence patterns and conceptual metaphors they used in writing.The results of this study show that at linguistic level,there is linguistic transfer tendency in EFL learners’ anger expression.30% participants use periphrastic causative construction“make +Exp+v-ed” and “N1+V1+N2+V2” to express anger,which is typical usage in Chinese,but this result still need more participants to make it more significant.At cognitive level,the author listed 58 sentences written by participants and invited four native speakers to help judge these sentences.The first two native speakers need to finish a questionnaire which asks them to judge if they can understand these sentences and do these sentences are authenticfor them,but the results are not very significant,they just polished the diction and tense for many sentences,which is not the focus of this thesis.Therefore,the author interviewed the other two native speakers face to face,and the results showed that among 58 sentences listed in questionnaire,there are 53% sentences are not authentic to express angry emotion,and these sentences can be categorized into three situations: the first one is sentences that make no sense;the second one is sentences that make another sense;and the last one is sentences that are understandable,but native speakers don’t say that way.This result shows that in cognitive level,there is evident conceptual transfer and participants transferred concepts of anger in Chinese to the expressions of English.The analysis of the third research question shows that participants under Chinese situation use periphrastic causative construction more and participants under English situation use lexical causative more to express anger,which means the situation will influence EFL learners’ anger expression: students under Chinese situation tend to use typical Chinese sentence patterns,and students under English situation tend to use typical English sentence patterns.Then in cognitive level,participants under Chinese situation use metaphors common in Chinese and English to expression anger,but participants under English situation not only use metaphors common in two languages,but also metaphors particular in English,therefore,the English situation has a greater influence on participants,and different situations will influence EFL learners’ anger expression.Through this thesis,there will be a clear description of sentence patterns and conceptual metaphors used by EFL learners when they express anger in English,and it confirms that language learning can change the cognition of learners.It also provides a reference for learners’ future study and makes their expressions more authentic.