Number And Assertiveness Of English Determiners ANY And SOME

Since the category of Determiner was put forward, its definition, classification and their relations with nouns have been attracting grammarians'interests. The Number and Assertiveness of English Determiners are always one of the difficulties for Chinese EFL learners. This paper reports a corpus-based contrastive study on English determiners ANY and SOME.ANY and SOME are two typical English Determiners. In the process of reviewing theories on English determiners, Quirk et al (1985), the latest editions of Collins and Oxford dictionaries, some discrepancies are discovered. With Wordsmith Tools, we analyzed concordances of ANY and SOME from the Brown corpus and found that the actual distribution of ANY and SOME in the aspect of Number and Assertiveness does not very well agree with description of the traditional school grammar. The survey of---the written part of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (the WECCL) reports that the Chinese EFL learners observe the school grammar very well, and differ significantly from American English. The most striking differences lie in the sentence forms with ANY and the Number of nouns modified by SOME.The differences might be attributed to the fact that Foreign Language Learners'grammar awareness is not acquired by the exposition to natural utterances, but mostly learnt from traditional grammar books and they usually faithfully observe the grammar rules stipulated in the grammar books or dictionaries. Further discussions with concordances suggest that Chinese EFL learners might be confused about the assertiveness of the determiners and the assertiveness of the sentences and influenced by its Chinese usual equivalents"一些",which implies quantity or amount, while overlooking its sense of "existence".The findings may help modify description of ANY and SOME in the English School grammar and make it more like the actual distribution of ANY and SOME in the Native Speaker's corpus.