| The word De is the single most frequently used word in Modern Chinese, and the De Construction (DC) accounts for the major part of Chinese Noun Phrases. Despite its high frequency, relatively little has been written on the acquisition of the DC by second language learners. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by investigating the acquisition of the DC by adult native English speakers. The major objective is to chart the course of development for the three major types of DC, namely the NDC (NP De NP), ADC (AP De NP), and VDC (VP de NP) and to understand the factors that determine the developmental course.;Participants of the study are fifty-one native-English-speaking learners of Chinese, grouped into three different proficiency levels; and twenty-one native Chinese speakers. They were asked to perform two tasks: a free conversation task and an oral translation task from English to Chinese. All DCs contained in their utterances were retrieved and served as the dataset of the study.;The study finds that the NDC and ADC are generally easier than the VDC, and that a De DC is generally easier than its Deless counterpart ( mutou de zhuozi 'wood De furniture; wooden furniture' vs. moutou zhuozi). It also demonstrates that there are internal differences within each of the three major categories of the DC. The acquisition order of the sub-types of NDC, ADC and VDC are also investigated.;The study has confirmed the previous findings - that processing demands, the semantic feature of the NDC, and the grammatical feature of the VDC contribute to the developmental process of the DC. More importantly, it has demonstrated systematically, for the first time, that factors like markedness, number of syllables, frequency and language transfer also have a role to play in deciding the acquisition process of the DC.;The present investigation of the Chinese DC has theoretical, methodological and pedagogical implications. Theoretically, it shows that L2 learners' initial behavior is determined by more than one factor. Besides, it shows that different structures have different characteristics: an initially-easy structure may not be easy at a later stage; an initially-hard structure may become easier later on. Thus, the whole learning process needs to be examined in order to give a comprehensive picture of the structures in question.;Methodologically, the Performance Difference Analysis (PDA) proposed by this study solves the no-obligatory problem posed by the optional use of De. It makes use of all the statistical information (including the lack of an expected significant difference) to emerge from the four-group comparison, and is able to provide a comprehensive developing process. The PDA and its difficulty hierarchy, together with the distinction of ordinary and exceptional structures, are a methodological contribution to the field. It is a valuable research tool and thus potentially useful in forming a cross-sectional study to examine the whole learning process.;Pedagogically, it highlights the difficulties that learners may encounter, and offers practical suggestions for second language educators in handling problems in the acquisition of the DC.;Key words: De-construction, second language acquisition, Chinese as a second language, acquisition order, performance difference analysis... |
