An Empirical Study On The Acquisition Of Copula Be

Researches on verb acquisition have been holding dominant position in both L1 and L2 acquisition domains. Copula be, as its special status in English language, has been widely studied in the field of language acquisition both in and aboard. Based on analyzing errors in Chinese college EFL learners'Interlanguage, the research question of this study was proposed: whether subject types and complement types as well as Chinese adverb shi structures impacted on Chinese EFL learners'acquisition of copula be?To answer the question, an empirical study of 2×4 factorial design was conducted. Subjects were freshmen of two classes chosen at random from Xiangtan University. The language samples were collected though a sentence correction task and a Chinese-English translation task. Eventually 60 pieces of paper were selected randomly for data analysis. SPSS 13.0 was employed to check the variance of mutual-level repeated measures for the purpose of better understanding Chinese EFL learners'acquisition of copula be.On the basis of data analysis, subject types and complement types were proved to be main factors that impacted on Chinese EFL learners'acquisition of copula be. The syntactic patterns which had been acquired by Chinese EFL learners from superior to inferior are:"pronoun + copula be">"nominal subject + copula be";"copula be + NP">"copula be + Adv. P">"copula be + Adj. P">"copula be + PP". Besides, Chinese syntactic pattern"adverb shi + verb"was proved to be a source of error. Moreover, the underlying reasons accounting for those factors were revealed: interlingual transfer, intralingual transfer and Universal Grammar had taken effect in the processes of interlanguage development.The current study is of both pedagogical and theoretical significance. Pedagogically, the syntactic patterns and error types concerning copula be revealed through data analysis would be of great help for teachers to predict the possible difficulties that students will encounter. Theoretically, the empirical statistics offers support for the effect of interlingual transfer, intralingual transfer as well as Universal Grammar accessibility in L2 acquisition.