The Use Of The By Chinese Learners Of English: From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

The English definite article has long been a subject of interest for linguists, given its complex usage and the difficulty involved in analyzing it. Much has been written about the meaning and the use of the; however, almost all previous studies only provide English learners a set of explicit rules that are not sufficiently predictive to learners. The reason is that the definite article encodes procedural—rather than conceptual—content, and procedural knowledge is generally implicit, rather than explicit (Zegarac, 2004). English learners can hardly acquire procedural knowledge through explicit instructions provided by pedagogical grammars.Zegarac (2004) attempted to open up a new avenue of research on the acquisition of the from the perspective of Relevance Theory. He explored some implications of Relevance Theory for the acquisition of the and predicted the types of errors made by English learners. Rather than providing a detailed set of "rules" for the use of the, he made a Relevance Theoretic procedural analysis of the and provided a relevance-based guideline for the use of it. Studying the definite article from a cognitive perspective is more rational than previous studies of pedagogical grammars; however, his predictions about the types of errors made by second language learners need to be tested through empirical research, and the guideline proposed by him is far from mature. Thus, further study is called for.This paper explains the errors made by Chinese learners of English in the use of the from the perspective of Relevance Theory. The author adopts a fill-in-the-article test and classifies four types of errors: the omission of the; the overuse of the; the substitution of the for a/an and the substitution of a/an for the. Typical errors occurred frequently in the test are then analyzed within the framework of Relevance Theory in order to explore implications. The study shows that the participants make errors mainly due to three reasons: 1) the information that the stimulus produces is not strong enough for the participants to select the communicator-intended assumption; 2) the participants lack relevant information that is needed in their cognitive environments; 3) Chinese learners of English tend to adopt the effort-driven strategy in their inferential processes. In light of the findings of the study, the author describes the meaning of the and the guideline for the use of the from Relevance Theory.