The Study Of Acquisiton Of The Non-Question Usage Of "Shenme"

Teaching Chinese as a second language is the quintessential interdisciplinary field, therefore Chinese language teachers must understand not only the fundamentals of the Chinese language itself, but also how students acquire Chinese. During the study and teaching experience, the author discovered that the non-question usage of interrogative pronouns such as "shenme" is widely used native Chinese speakers, but it has neither been sufficiently researched, nor equally valued in the teaching Chinese as a second language system. Therefore, we decided to take the acquisition of the non-question usage of "shenme" as the focus of our research, and hope that with this research, this usage will be properly valued and reasonably taught to foreigner students.This thesis is divided into three sections. In the first section, based on the existing research result and data from the mother tongue corpus, we found out that there are three usages and thirteen individual forms of "shenme", in which the non-question usage is the most frequently and with the greatest number of forms.The second section continues to rely on the corpus. With the data of nine non-question forms of "shenme" from the interlanguage corpus, we study the acquisition situation and process of each form. We find that foreign students have very different usage habits of these non-question forms and foreign students with different language backgrounds seem to have comparatively similar acquisition order, which is mainly impacted by each form's cognizable difficulty, and also affected by the timing and frequency of the form in textbooks, the demand of acquisition of the form and other factors.The last section will focus on the revelations we have about the importance of the non-question usage of "shenme" and how we should teach this to foreign students. Since the non-question usage of the interrogative pronouns such as "shenme" is so widely used with many rich forms, it should not be viewed as simply an exception to the question usage. On the contrary, it should be at least equally valued in the teaching Chinese as second language system and even more emphasized for its difficulty.