A Study On The Acquisition Of Chinese Polysemous Adverb Hai (还) By Native-spainish Learners

The use frequency of adverb hai ranks No.27in top8000Chinese words of the highestuse frequency and it also ranks No.5in the category of adverb. In teaching Chinese as aforeign language, hai also occupies an important position. The Chinese ProficiencyVocabulary and Grade outline of Chinese Characters compiled by the leading group forteaching Chinese as a foreign language in China has written that hai belongs to the class-Avocabulary, and Chinese learners must master it in the primary stage. Due to the ambiguity,high abstraction and the flexible syntactic position of these words like hai, their usages areextremely complex. When native speakers usually acquire them in a natural environment,they often pay less attention to these special words and think there is no difference amongthem and it’s not difficult to acquire them. However, we have found that Spanish studentshave made many mistakes when they use hai in the process of learning Chinese. Obviouslythere are many problems in learning and even teaching the adverb hai. To solve theseproblems, it’s absolutely not enough only to be with the sense of language, but also dependson the researchers’ exploration about the problems. From “analysis of modern Chinesemeticulous deconstruction” to “description and analysis of foreigners interlanguage”, thesetwo aspects are indispensable. We can find the real problems only in the comparison of thesetwo aspects, and only when we find “the cause of this disease” could we explain it and useappropriate methods to solve it. So we choose this issue aiming at doing a deep research aboutthe Spanish students’ acquisition of the polysemous adverb hai.A test paper for the polysemy adverb hai was designed according to its grammar andsemantic characteristics, which was divided into three parts: synonym discrimination test,word location test and translation test. Based on the test paper, the acquisition condition of thepolysemous adverb hai by45L1Spanish students was investigated. From the perspective oflanguage teaching and application for Spanish and under the framework of the theory oflanguage acquisition, the subcategories of polysemous adverb hai was classified and asystematic description and interpretation was done by using the interlanguage theory, the erroranalysis theory and the markedness differential hypothesis. At the same time, the acquisitionorder hypothesis of hai was proposed according to the grammaticalization theory. On this basis of it, the common types of errors caused by Spanish students about the use thepolysemous adverb hai was concluded and we found out the causes of errors. Finally, we havestudied the acquisition order of hai through the analyzing of the errors, correcting ofsentences’ rate and implicational scale matrix. It is: B1(continuation)<A1(repetition)<B2(quantity reduction)<A2(incremental complement)<B4(narration of the past)<C2(basicsatisfaction)<D1(imperative sentence)<A3(comparison)<B3(degree of magnitude)<C1(irrationality)<D2(rhetorical question)<D3(assertive sentence). It is easy to see that themeaning of continuation has been well-acquired by L1Spanish learners. Which follows arerepetition, quantity reduction, incremental complement and narration of the past. In a word,two categories are easier to acquire——the usage of repetition and what associated with it(Category A), and the usage of continuation and what associated with it (Category B). Theothers are more difficult to acquire. They are the usage of expressing comment and view ofspeaker (Category C) and the usage of strengthening the mood (Category D). Meanwhile,some constructive suggestions are put forward for teaching Chinese as a foreign language toL1Spanish learners, hoping that we can provide practical and effective methods for L1Spanish learners to understand and use the polysemous adverb hai accurately.