A Study On Chinese Learners' Acquisition Of English Existential Construction

English existential construction has always been a study focus in the field of linguistics and second language acquisition. Many researchers at home and abroad have studied it. However, most researches are theoretical studies; the study on the acquisition of it is rather limited. Domestic studies mainly employed a small number of elicited data for analysis, which can not fully reveal the authentic situation in Chinese learners'application of existential construction. Besides, few researchers investigate the development features in Chinese learners'acquisition of existential construction and discourse-pragmatic function of existential construction in CIL.Based on corpus and writing assignment, this paper employs Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis and Error Analysis to do researches on Chinese learners' acquisition of existential construction. Firstly, with the help of Ant Conc.and BNC online search service, the existential constructions in CLEC and BNC are retrieved and compared in terms of the overall frequency and existential verbs to reveal the quantitative and qualitative differences between Chinese learners and native speakers of English. Secondly, this study carefully examines existential constructions in learner corpus and the discourse-pragmatic function of existential construction in CIL context is exposed. Thirdly, the errors in the learner corpus are identified, classified and explained to reveal the difficulties in Chinese learners'acquisition of EC. At last this study compares and analyzes existential constructions produced in writing assignments from two dimensions:the complexity and grammaticality of EC to expose the development in Chinese learners'acquisition of EC.After comparison and analysis of the data collected from corpus and writing assignments, this study finds that:(1) There are significant differences between Chinese learners and native speakers of English in the application of existential construction. Quantitatively, there are more existential constructions in CLEC than in BNC in terms of overall frequency. Chinese learners have a tendency to overuse existential construction in their L2 output. However, in terms of existential verbs, they are distributed unequally in CLEC, in which live, exist, and come are used frequently. Besides, compared with native speakers, Chinese learners tend to underuse existential verbs in their L2 output.(2) Existential constructions serve discourse topic introducing function, background information providing function and discourse developing function in CIL context. Chinese learners tend to employ existential sentences at the beginning of an essay to introduce discourse topic of argumentative writing or provide background information in narrative writing. In order to meet the development of discourse, existential sentences are often employed in the middle of an essay to introduce subtopics for further or upcoming discussions.(3) The error analysis shows that major types of errors that Chinese learners make are subject-predicate disagreement, existential pseudo-relative clauses, have type and misuse of there be. This indicates that subject-predicate agreement and existential relative clauses are the difficulties in Chinese learners'acquisition of EC.(4) The acquisition of existential construction develops as the increase in accuracy rate and decrease in error rate. With the improvement of learners' proficiency, more varieties of EC are employed to express existence. Generally speaking, Chinese learners experience three stages in the acquisition of existential construction. The first stage is characterized as simple EC. The second stage is featured as mainly simple EC and the spring up of complex EC. The third stage is characterized as the coexistence of simple EC and grammatical complex EC.Based on the findings obtained from this study, this paper also sheds lights on the teaching of English existential construction.