The Interaction Between Syntactic And Semantic Modules In Chinese Learners' English Spontaneous Speech

In Fodor's modular theory, the central cognition is not modular. However, mentalmodularity claims that the mind also contains a number of innately channeled conceptualmodules, designed to process conceptual information concerning particular domains. On thisview, the mind is modular or at least massively modular in nature.There are interactive effects between the central modules and language modules. Thecentral cognition may deploy and redeploy resources from language modules which arespecifically divided into several subsystems---morphological, phonological, syntactic,semantic and pragmatic modules. Moreover, the language modules can be accessed to thecentral mind though such accessibility is generated by the central modules. To be specific, activated syntactic module could speed up speech processing;partially activated syntactic module may hinder semantic production. On the contrary,activated semantic module could also influence selection of syntactic structures. Then thepurpose of this dissertation is to explore the interactions between language modules and thecentral cognition and also between syntactic and semantic modules.Therefore, this paper will accomplish a qualitative study on English unreal conditional(simple subjunctive mood) spontaneous speeches for Chinese learners. Thus, synthetic andinductive approaches will be adopted. The analysis on two sets of data---one is syntactic errorand semantic error, and the other is pauses, repetitions and repairs---will be reduced toseveral possible results which may show the interactions and the extent that one mayinfluence the other in unreal conditional productions. Finally, the results may make somecontributions in subjunctive mood learning.