A Study Of The Acquisition Of Focusing Adverbs In Chinese-English Interlanguage

The present study examines the overall frequency and acquisition rule of FocusingAdverbs(FAs) in Chinese-English interlanguage, combining quantitative analysis andqualitative analysis. With software AntConc and the tool Log-likelihood Ratio Calculator,the thesis compares the frequencies of FAs across native speaker’s corpus(LOCNESS) andthe Chinese-English interlanguage corpus(WECCL) and analyzes them in details. Themain findings are as follows:(1) on the whole, there are similarities and differences on theuse of FAs across LOCNESS and WECCL;(2) The top four high frequent FAs both inLOCNESS and WECCL are also, only, even and just respectively; and the last two lowfrequent FAs are principally and nor;(3) There are significant differences between theChinese English learners and native speakers in terms of the FAs’ distribution in sentencesand their collocation with other constituents in the sentence. With regard to explaining andexploring the underlying reasons for the observed differences, several factors can be takeninto account:(1) transfer of mother tongue;(2) cognition of Chinese English learners;(3)lexical processing.Although research perspectives on FAs show a trend of diversification, studying FAsbased on interlanguage corpus and making a contrast between the Chinese English learnersand native speakers under the contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA) is insufficient atpresent. On the basis of the frequency of all FAs and the detailed analysis of FAs’placement and collocation in sentences, distinctiveness and characteristics of FAs inChinese-English interlanguage are reflected and the differences on FAs across WECCL andLOCNESS are revealed. Therefore, the present study not only enriches the study on FAsand contributes to deepen understanding towards FAs in Chinese-English interlanguage,but also has practical implications for second language acquisition and teaching methods ofEnglish as a foreign language.