On Chinese EFL Students' Acquisition Of English MC Based On The Comparison Of MC In Chinese And English

This paper analyzes the features of middle construction (MC henceforth) and explicates the constraints of the MC in English and Chinese, intending to find the similarities and differences between these two languages. Based on Contrastive Analysis (CAH henceforth) and the inquiry, this paper aims to find out how well Chinese learners of English have mastered English MC, and the difficulties in the acquisition of English MC.This paper is made up of two parts, namely, the theory and our research.In the theoretical part, we first illustrate the most typical and widely accepted features of MC, and categorize them into syntactic features and semantic features. Then, we separate a typical MC into three parts, i.e. subject, middle verb, and modifier, and analyze the constraints for each of them. We conclude that Chinese and English MC share the same features and the verb constraint, but differ in the constraint of subject and the modifier.In the research, we made the following hypotheses:a. The knowledge of MC increases as the learners' proficiency level grows.b. Chinese learners of English have no problem in judging the features of English MC.c. Chinese learners of English have problems in choosing which kind of subjects and modifiers can be used in English MC, but have no problem in distinguishing which kind of verb can be used in English MC.d. CAH works in the acquisition of English MC by Chinese learners of English.The statistical result proves that in the process of acquiring English MC by Chinese EFL learners, the mother tongue both facilitates and hinders the acquisition of English MC.