A Study On Chinese Measure Words Acquisition Of The Ethnic Minorities Learners In Xinjiang

A rich system of measure words is one of the marked features of Modern Chinese. Measure words have an important place in the Chinese-Tibetan language system ,especially in Modern Chinese.Nominal measure words are the most numerous measure words, as well as the earliest in origin and the most complicated to use. They are also one of the word-classes which minority learners of Chinese make the most errors with during their language-learning. Teaching nominal measure words is one of the difficult aspects of teaching Chinese as a second language; this essay will analyze from the cognitive point of view the problems that arise in minority students' acquisition of nominal measure words during the process of learning Chinese. A thorough analysis will be carried out from the cognitive point of view, for the benefit of Chinese language teaching.The dissertation falls into five chapters:Chapter I describes in brief the purpose and significance of this essay,and reviews some previous studies on the subject;Chapter II, outlines the theoretical basis of cognitive linguistic research, particularly those aspects providing the theoretical basis of this essay, including acquisition theory, image schema theory,theory of metaphor, theory of meonymy, the terms "bounded" and "unbounded";Chapter III, analyzes the situation of Xinjiang minority students' acquisition of Chinese nominal measure words. This essay will carry out analysis from two standpoints: that of the natural language corpus and that of the questionnaire. On the basis of the corpus, the mistakes made by students while acquiring nominal measure words can be broadly divided into five categories: lack of measure word,redundancy, overuse of the measure word个(gè), use of the wrong measure word, and use of a measure word of the wrong register. In analyzing the questionnaire, the situation of minority language students' use of "a measure word with more than one noun" and "a noun with more than one measure word" is discussed;Chapter IV, takes a cognitive linguistic approach to discussing the particular characteristics of minority students' acquisition of nominal measure words in Chinese;provides some suggestions for rectifying common errors made by minority students while learning Chinese nominal measure words;In conclusion, a bried summary is made of the essay, and some issues worthy of further study are put forward.