A Markedness Theory-based Research On Chinese College Students’ Learning Of English Subject-verb Agreement

Since it was founded by N.S. Trubetzkoy in the1930s, Markedness has been expoundedupon and furthered by Jackson, Chomsky, Greenberg, Lyons and other linguists. With theseresearchers’ efforts, the concept has developed into a systematic theory. Nowadays, markednesstheory possesses a great amount of explanatory power in every linguistic domain and has beenapplied to subject matters in phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, second languageacquisition and other fields. Despite its wide application, this theory is rarely adopted inresearch on errors in English subject-verb agreement. Based on relevant studies at home andabroad, this paper concentrates on the effect of markedness on subject-verb agreement errors.Three hypotheses are proposed in this thesis under the framework of markedness theory:(1) Since errors are more likely with the marked feature than with the unmarked feature, in thecase of learning subject-verb agreement, errors connected with the singular verb (the marked)would outnumber those connected with the plural verb (the unmarked);(2) Errors ofsubject-verb agreement are more likely with complicated sentences than simple ones;(3) Theobscurities of the target feature (here the rule of subject-verb agreement) would lead to moreerrors.By using the software Antconc3.2.1and SPSS17.0, this study retrieves and analyzesdata from the sub-corpora St3and St4of the CLEC. Instances which contain the use ofsubject-verb agreement rule are retrieved, described and summarized to testify the firsthypothesis. A written test is then devised to conduct an experiment among college Englishlearners, an experiment which is intended to investigate the connection between the frequencyof subject-verb agreement errors and the nature of sentence subjects. Learners in the experimentare required to complete the sentences with corresponding link verbs and the aim of thisexperiment is to test the second and third hypotheses. In this test, the responses of the learnersare scored by the criterion of “being correct” or “being error”.The retrieved results and the outcome of the experiment have provided strong evidence for the argument of this thesis. More specifically, when the form of the verb is singular,subject-verb agreement errors tend to increase; when the sentence is complicated, especiallywhen there are certain inserted constituents between the subject and verb, errors also tend toincrease; in addition, the obscurities of the target feature could result in more errors inconforming to the rule of subject-verb agreement.Several conclusions are drawn from this research:(1) The singular feature of the verbwould more likely result in errors in subject-verb agreement;(2) Errors are more likely incomplicated sentences; and (3) obscurities that are inherent with the target language could leadto more subject-verb agreement errors. To sum up, the marked feature of the English verb has areal effect on the learning of subject-verb agreement.