A Study On The Acquisition Of Chinese Modal Adverbs By Foreign Students

From the perspective of languages' information-disseminating function and mankind's cognition, this paper specifies the property of Mood and re-classifies and re-defines the Modal Adverb(MA) in modem Chinese, in order to identify target of Second Language Acquisition(SLA) research. Through the forms of analyzing the corpus of Chinese Interlanguage , testing, doing questionnaires and interviewing, with the methods of qualification and quantification combined, we survey the status quo of Chinese Acquisition as a Second Language(CASL) on MA and analyze the all relative statistics by testifying it with hypothesis from foreign SLA theories, hence we identify the acquisition difficulties, difficulty levels and sequence of acquisition, with a special attention for the adverb "Ye(也)". On this basis, we analyze and interpret the motivation and restriction factors of acquisition sequence by the theories of Error Analysis, Contrastive Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, therefore we put forward the studying strategy and pedagogical strategy of MA in Teaching Chinese as Second Language (TCSL). The achievement of this paper will be useful to the MA study of Chinese and SLA study, theoretically and practically. There are nine chapters in this paper.Chapter one introduces the background, the progress and existing problems of MA acquisition study as well as the purpose of the paper and proposal for solution. MA has many functions including evidential function, emotive function, and discourse coherence function, and it is the key point of SLA. The interlanguage corpus shows, with low frequency of usage, MA has high error rate in its acquisition, therefore it's a difficulty in the SLA. But the problem is there is no any systematic research on the acquisition sequence of MA so far, so it is really necessary to conduct a research on the factors which exert influence on the acquisition of MA.After surveying definition of "Mood" "Tone" "Attitude" in some modern dictionaries and its usage in corpus, Chapter two re-defines the concept of "Mood" and "Tone", suggesting mood should be classified from the angle of communication function and modality.Chapter three gives the definition of MA, by which the criterion to identify a MA is set, after previous study was summarized. It analyzes the syntactic distribution, semantic function and pragmatic function of MA, on the basis of which MA is re-classified. It also circumscribes the MAs which are our target of research, with the syllabus of TCSL taken into account.Chapter four is the test-oriented research on 56 acquisition items of MA. First we introduce the scheme of the test and some information about those testees. Then we analyze the statistics of answers to the 56 items from three aspects, namely syntactic distribution, semantic understanding and pragmatic meaning. Therefore we align the acquisition sequence of MA according to accuracy, which verifies the Natural Sequence Hypothesis in SLA and shows that the acquisition sequence is related to the sub-category of MA and it presents the gradient from "Epistemic" to"Deontic" and to "Emotive" category. After the reliability and validity are tested and verified by computing the statistics of usage frequency of MA from interlanguage corpus and...