| It is an undisputable fact that Chinese and English belong to different types oflanguage. From the perspective of language typology, Chinese belongs totopic-prominent language and English is subject-prominent language.Topic-prominence and subject-prominence are two of the typical typological factorsset up by the scholars for the research of cross-linguistic transfer. Due to the extensiverecognition and research of the influence of L1transfer on the SLA, interlanguage, asan independent language system between native language and target language, canreflect the typological difference between Chinese topic-prominent and Englishsubject-prominent features.Both scholars at home and abroad have acquired fruitful achievements on therelevant research with respect to the typological classification of TP and SP. Based onthe previous study and within the framework of language typology, the present studyfocuses on the syntactic existential construction to reveal the nature of interlanguagedevelopment by exploring the rules and norms of EC used in native language andtarget language.This study would conduct the empirical research on the Chinese EFL learners atthree different language proficiency levels by means of questionnaire and analyze theexperimental results with the tool of EXCEL.90Chinese EFL learners are chosen asthe subjects and divided into three groups, respectively representing the preliminarylevel, intermediate level and advanced level. In the empirical research, the90subjects are asked to make sentences according to pictures and translate Chinese into English.Questionnaire1is for making sentences according to the24pictures,of them,16pictures show space relationship between two objects that tend to stimulate thesubjects to produce existential construction sentences;8pictures are interferencepictures which are not prone to stimulate the existential construction. Questionnaire2for translating Chinese to English consists of24sentences,8of which are interferencesentences not prone to stimulate existential construction, and16of which are mainlywith the Chinese character "有" for stimulating students to produce the there besentence in the translation task. Meanwhile, among the16sentences,3symmetric alsentences are designed to test whether Chinese synta x influence on Chinese-Englishtranslation under the circumstance that all the meanings of these sentences expressedby pictures are the same. The8groups of interference pictures (sentences) aredesigned to avoid unintentionally and suggestibly leading the subjects’ concentrationon the data that the experiment needs and affecting the data quality. This researchobtains the interlanguage corpus by the above-mentioned questionnaires paper testing.Based on the previous experimental research, this paper is dedicated topromoting the research methodology to exclude other interference factors and mainlytests the topic-prominent and subject-prominent features in existential constructionproduced by the Chinese EFL learners and how Chinese syntax influences the resultsof Chinese-English translation among Chinese EFL learners. The experiment isconducted to prove two research hypotheses in this paper:1.Topic-to-SubjectHypothesis.The development of interlanguage is a process of the topic-to-subjecttransformation according to their proficiency levels with the point cut of existentialconstructions on Chinese-English interlanguage discourse;2.Syntax DisturbanceHypothesis. The syntactic structure of Chinese EFL learners‘L1will influence theway the students translate their L2works, especially the effect will influence thestudents at preliminary level more than the ones at advanced level. Experimental statistics and analytical results clearly reveals that learners at thepreliminary level seldom produce there be structures with subject-prominence;learners at the intermediate level overproduce the there be structures, which typifiesthe interlanguage development; nevertheless, learners of the advanced level adopt theexpression close to target language and produce less there be structures than learnersof the intermediate-level by employing the learning strategies and currentcomprehensive knowledge. Hence, from the development process of acquiring theexistential construction by Chinese EFL learners, we can derive the conclusion that inthe acquisition of the English syntactic structures, interlanguage undergoes thetransformation from topic-prominence to subject-prominence for Chinese EFLlearners. In addition, by comparing the number of there be sentences produced inQuestionnaire1and Questionnaire2, and the number of there be sentences elicited bythree pairs of symmetrical sentences with or without Chinese character―有‖, we canconclude that Chinese syntax has influence on Chinese-English translation worksespecially the effect will influence the students at preliminary level more than theones at advanced level.Besides, this paper explores the reason of interlanguage transformation fromtopic-prominence to subject-prominence from the aspects of native languagetransfer,influence of Chinese Confucius and Mencius culture, and indicates Chinesesouthern dialect, which bears slight difference from Mandarin on grammar, may exertslightly different influence on the second language learning process. As the limitationsof experiment conditions,time and personal level of southern dialects, this papercannot delve into the influence of dialects on experimental results and could onlyplaces hope in further research.New framework and further research in this dissertation are going to be exploredwith the hope that could give detail support on the two research hypotheses andprovide meaningful theoretical and pedagogical implications in SLA teaching techniques... |
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