A Cognitive Study On The Use Of Chinese Quantifiers By International Students

In pace with the increasing global influence of China, studying Chinese has beenpopular worldwide. As a branch of Sino-Tibetan language family, Chinese is rich inquantifiers which cause a significant difficulty for Chinese learners. The cognitive studyon the use of quantifiers at home began in1990s. The previous studies have culminatedin consensus on the crucial role of cognitive activities in the acquisition of the quantifiers.Nevertheless, the empirical study which combines the cognitive linguistics theories andChinese quantifier learners remains as an unexplored field.Based on the theory of categorization, Conceptual Metaphor theory as well asIdealized Cognitive Metaphor, the thesis makes a summary of five cognitive models usedin acquiring the quantifiers, namely, Overall Measurement Model, Image Analogy Model,Image Schematic Model, Category Classification Model and Ontological Metaphor Model.This study aims at an empirical research on the cognitive models used by internationalstudents when they learn quantifiers. The strong and weak aspects of the use of thosecognitive models will also be examined. A test on the use of each cognitive model wasdesigned, and the research subjects were international students from Huazhong Universityof Science and Technology and Wuhan UniversityThe results showed that in term of frequency of the use of these models, the OverallMeasurement Model ranked the highest, followed by Image Analogy Model, CategoryClassification Model, Image Schematic Model and Ontological Metaphor Model. Besides,Overall Measurement Model was primarily used in acquiring the individual and measuringquantifiers; Image Analogy Model was chiefly employed in acquiring the individualquantifiers; Category Classification Model was principally used in acquiring the collectivequantifiers; Image Schematic Model was mainly employed in acquiring the individual quantifiers and temporary quantifiers. Ontological Metaphor Model was used in acquiringthe temporary quantifiers. The study further investigated that the strong aspects of thesemodels were Overall Measurement Model, Image Analogy Model and CategoryClassification Model in sequence, of which the accuracy rate was higher than50%. ImageSchematic Model and Ontological Metaphor Model were weak aspects of the modelsrelatively, of which the accuracy rate was lower than50%. In accordance with the majorfindings, some learning and pedagogical strategies are prominently introduced in thethesis, such as the method of association, differentiation and classification to improve theteaching of quantifiers and advance the development of teaching Chinese as a secondlanguage.