Modern Chinese High-frequency Adverb "also"

The "warming" of Chinese throughout the world has brought about the popularity of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL), which therefore offers a new view in the study of Chinese linguistics. The acquisition order of Chinese grammatical items in Second Language Acquisition has aroused general interest in the area of TCFL study in recent years. As the study of Chinese itself and the acquisition order of Chinese as a second language are different sides of the same topic, the study of both issues as an organic whole will lead to progress in the research. The synchronic study of Chinese is crucial to TCFL, and the diachronic study on grammaticalization also gives a general guidance to the arrangement of grammatical items in language teaching. Therefore we look into this problem through the acquisition of Chinese by non-native speakers. We choose a complicated grammatical item, identify its sub-meanings, and make comparison between their second language acquisition order and their grammaticalization order. Correlation tests are taken and an interpretation of the results is given.The grammatical item we choose here is a frequently used adverb in modern Chinese-HAI (second tone). Comparisons will be made between the grammaticalization order and second language acquisition order of its sub-meanings.We first look at the different usages of HAI in modern Chinese and identify 7 sub-meanings as follows:HAI1-continuance/duration;HAI2-repetition;HAI3-to add/attach;HAI4-deepening in degree;HAI5-not deep in degree;HAI6-Negating the highest value of a given domain leads to the negating of all the other values in the same domain;HAI7-various moods arising from anti-expectation.Then we examine the corpus of ancient Chinese language from Pre-Qin to Qing dynasty, and fix the diachronic order of HAI's 7 sub-meanings;We get some useful figures after corpus study by collecting errors of HAI in non-Chinese learners' compositions and questionnaires. Through studying the results of active and passive outputs, we obtain the accuracy rate of HAI's each sub-meaning. According to which an acquisition order is formed. The following step is to make a comparison between the grammaticalization order and the acquisition order.As the result reveals, there exists a very high consistency between the two orders. That is to say, both Diachronic Language Evolution (DLE) and Individual Language Development (ILD) follow the same pattern and repeat roughly the same path within a particular language. Therefore, we hold that this finding might prove the existence of Universal Grammar.As for the differences between the two orders, we speculate on their causes as well. We think that the acquisition order of the seven sub-meanings of HAI might have been influenced by the following four factors:"differences in markedness", "frequency", "regularization degree of syntax" and "grammatical items' arrangements in teaching materials". That is the reason why the two orders cannot be exactly the same.If we could make use of the findings in TCFL, we believe we will benefit a great deal and achieve a better effect in teaching.