The Acquisition Of Subject-verb Agreement In Existential There-be Construction By Chinese English Majors

This study investigates the acquisition of Chinese English majors’ subject-verbagreement (AGR) in Existential There-be Construction with the help of the Spokenand Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL2.0) within theframework of the Minimalist Program (MP). The adopted linguistic materials consistof both written and spoken texts with a total of more than200,000words, and eachtext is examined in terms of the subject-verb AGR both in the Existential There-beConstruction and the ordinary SVO structure. The results show that there is nosignificant difference between the acquisitions of these two kinds of subject-verbAGRs, and that the written language output is better than the spoken one. As for thethere-be structure, little difference is found between the spoken and written output, theChi-square test is used and shows no statistical difference existing between them,namely no difference: there exist two kinds of inconsistencies between the subject andthe verb, one lies in the noun phrase (NP) subject, the other is the overuse of verbs.The conclusions of the present study are as follows: Firstly, Chinese learners canacquire subject-verb agreement in the existential there-be construction; Secondly, thepost positive verb in this structure has no effect on the acquisition of subject-verbagreement; Thirdly, a small amount of missing inflection of AGR is due to uncertaintyof word forms, time limitation and communication pressure or information processingdifficulties, which supports the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis, i.e. thelearners’ interlinguage grammar (IG) system is intact without any damage. Finally, L1lexical and functional categories are transferred into the L2initial state, and theirtransferring degrees are varied in the two structures, but L1negative transfer can begradually set as the learners master the L2functional features like subject-verbagreement in steps, which supports the Valueless Features Hypothesis to some extent. Three phenomena attract our interests during the investigation, namelysubject-verb disagreement, overuse of there-be chunk structures and relatively steadydistribution of agreement inflections for both written and spoken output of ExistentialThere-be Construction. And we propose three explanations including the ProsodicTransfer Hypothesis, the “there be” chunk structures featuring easy computations, theinteractions between Chinese “you” sentences with their topics prominent and English“there be” structure, IG and the NP+verb collocation as a colligation. Firstly,different phonological structures between English and Chinese can directly accountfor the missing of agreement inflections. Secondly, the there-be chunk structures havedeveloped into the learners’ first choice in using Existential There-be Constructionboth in the written and spoken output because of its unique property as a combinationof being prefabricated in the lexicon and economizing the syntactic computation.Thirdly, the phenomenon of no significant difference in the written and spoken outputof agreement inflections and the generation of “there be+NP+verb” structure resultsfrom the interactions of several factors, namely the high accuracy rate of agreementinflections in “there be” chunk structure, the learners’ L1and L2similarities insyntactics, semantics and discourse, IG and the colligation relations between NPs andverbs in English sentences.