The Sense Of Linguistic Awareness: Its Generation And Development

Yugan (语感) is a concept put forward in teaching and learning Chinese. Generally speaking, it refers to a person's subconscious sense and feeling towards language while he/she learns and uses it. In English, there are various expressions similar to yugan, such as "language feeling", "language intuition", "language / linguistic awareness" and "language / linguistic consciousness". Yugan, as one of the major ways for human beings to master a language, has a direct connection with a person's effect of language learning. In recent years, yugan has aroused a lot of scholars' interest both at home and abroad. But because of the differences in viewpoints and study methods, there is still not a comprehensive, generally-accepted theory about yugan up to now. The mystery of yugan is Goldbach's Conjecture in linguistics and is still waiting to be revealed. On the basis of previous researches, this thesis tries to explore the generation and development of yugan and carries out a yugan test. The whole thesis falls into six parts.The first chapter serves as an introduction, putting forward the main consideration of the study-yugan, giving an initiative view of it, describing the research's rationale, its aims and methods, and arranging the organization of the thesis.Chapter two is the literature review, presenting the achievements and limitations of the previous studies and proposing the questions for the study in this thesis.The main part is the third chapter. In this chapter, the author explores the generation and development of yugan from the perspective of cognitive developmental psychology with the help of the consideration in line with functional grammar, biological foundation of language and Universal Grammar in four steps.In the first step, we find evidence to prove the existence of yugan and the possibility of making a scientific study of it. Though Halliday mainly concerns himself with the function of language, he realizes the unconsciousness of language, which in part proves the existence of yugan. And we agree with him that it is absurd, even arrogant to assert that because you cannot define something, therefore it has no meaning.So we confidently believe that the so-called "mysterious" yugan can be studied scientifically.In the second step, we make clear the biological foundation of language since yugan is inseparable from it. Researches show that language is human-specific and its biological foundation consists of two parts: the vocal organs and language ability. Most people agree that the latter is both inherited by birth and influenced by environment. Yugan is one of the language abilities, so it is also the result of both inheritance and environment.In the third step, we must be clear about the inherited nature of yugan with the help of Chomsky's theories. Based on the innateness hypothesis, Chomsky develops his Universal Grammar, and puts forward some concepts like LAD, competence, which are synonyms of yugan. Chomsky believes that every normal human being is born with a LAD. The LAD includes basic knowledge about the nature and structure of human language, that is, Universal Grammar. In the same way, normal human beings must be born with a yugan device, which is common to all human beings regardless of which language they speak. Later, under the influence of language environment, people develop their yugan toward the language they speak.In the final step, we discuss the generation and development of yugan in detail and draw on Piaget's cognitive developmental theory about children. Among various cognitive structures, there must be a yugan structure. Like other structures, it has three properties: integration, transformation and auto-adaptation. And the development of yugan also has the constructive feature, which reflects the interaction between subject and environment. As regards to the concrete generative and developmental mechanism of yugan, Piaget's analysis about children's cognitive development mechanism provides a relatively satisfactory explanation. Subject has an intrinsic...