The Acquisition Of Existential Sentences By Chinese Learners Of English

Noam Chomsky's universal grammar has offered a logical framework to explain the acquisition of the first language acquisition. Nevertheless, the question as to whether the L2 learners have access to UG remains indefinite among the researchers who are studying the application of the principles and parameters theory to the SLA. Although UG offers a precise and scientific framework of L1 acquisition, the accessibility of UG to SLA remains controversial. White outlined five possible positions regarding the availability of UG that center around two main variables, transfer and access, i.e., full transfer/partial (or no) access, no transfer/full access, full transfer/full access, partial transfer/ full access and partial transfer/partial accessIn addition, recent proposals within learnability theory concentrate limiting the order in which learners entertain hypotheses in an attempt to ensure that learners do not start off with over inclusive grammars that would require negative evidence for disconfinmation. To this end, a learning principle, known as the Subset Principle has been proposed. The Subset Principle can thus be considered a preventive measure that guards the learner from over-general grammars which would require negative evidence to disconfirm them. Recently a number of studies have investigated L2 acquisition to examine whether the Subset Principle still operates as effectively as in L1 acquisition. One can broadly distinguish two classes of the claims, i.e., the Subset Principle operates or doesn't operate in L2 acquisition.This thesis is to examine the roles of the Subset Principle and UG in L2 acquisition through the research of the acquisition of existential sentences by Chinese learners of English. Three general questions were proposed to guide the research, namely:(1) Can learners correctly use existential sentences without the relative pronoun or participle missing? What are the quantitative difference and the qualitative difference in making erroneous English existential sentences by the EFL learners in China across three different years?(2) Can the EFL learners relax the definiteness on subjects? Is there anyThe Acquisition of Existential Sentences by Chinese Learners o f English______________________________ vquantitative difference among the three groups?(3) Can the EFL learners use various existential verbs apart from "be" following expletive "there"?The research adopted a cross-sectional design according to the aim of the research. The senior-3 middle school students, the second-year non-English majors and the English majors were simultaneously chosen as subjects. Changes reoccurring in the course of the learners' use of Existential constructions were regarded as developmental.The results reported here suggest that when the L1 and L2 overlap in terms of the structures they permit, parameter resetting is not straightforward; the L2 data will be largely consistent with L1 setting. The evidence from the Senior 3 students and the Non-English majors in making erroneous 'there be' sentences supports the transfer hypothesis, that is, the results from the various erroneous sentences suggest that many of the learners assumed English to be like Chinese in terms of pivotal constructions. They may be only partially aware that they must make the English sentences without the relative pronoun or the participle missing. The results are not consistent with the Subset Principle. The result of English majors shows that the Subset Principle does operate in L2 acquisition with the help of Uniqueness Principle. As for the use of definiteness on subjects, the results show learners could relax the definiteness on subjects if the positive evidence is sufficient, whereas the Chinese learners seldom used other existential verbs apart from 'be', this maybe ascribed to the lack of sufficient positive evidence.It can be concluded from this paper that the L2 learners could only get indirect access to the universal grammar (UG) because the L2 learning is from the initial state of LI instead of the z...