A Study Of L2 Reverse Transfer On Chinese English Learners’ Emotional Concept

Second language transfer is the influence between the target language and any other acquired or learned language. In terms of directionality, the influence of L2 on L1 is named reverse transfer, which is being studied deeply with achievements abroad but lacks sufficient studies at home. Language is closely linked to cognition. As Kesckes noted that language was important for researching conceptual system, cognition itself should be an important aspect for researching language transfer.After searching through research materials, emotional conceptual transfer, which is one of the eight domains of conceptual transfer, is barely studied at home and abroad, except for Pavenko who has done two successive studies relating to emotional conceptual transfer. Thus, this thesis attempts to establish a corpus of Chinese essays written by Chinese English learners to look into the impact of English on Chinese exclamatory sentence and analyze the test results from the perspective of conceptual change.By establishing two corpora consisting of blogs from advanced Chinese English learners and essays from high school students in practice College Entrance Examination Chinese paper, the study searches all the exclamatory sentence to find ones with Europeanized problems according to seven categories of Europeanizing Chinese structure, and finally fill the data into Excel worksheet for comparison and test of significance. In general, the test has testified the research hypotheses. First, there are exclamatory sentences in both Corpus A (advanced English learners) and Corpus B (English learners at lower stage) fitting descriptions of Chinese Europeanizing problems. Second, the test of significance on two independent samples showed that A and B have strong differences in the level of Chinese Europeanizing and that A is much more influenced by Europeanizing than B.Then the thesis analyzes the Europeanized exclamatory sentences one by one and discusses the phase of Europeanization in three conditions and suggests:First, putting the subject to the rear, disordering the sequence of preposition words, frequent use of conjecture words and the usage of "one" may bring a negative influence to Chinese, so we should fix that kind of problem and avoid errors. Second, Europeanized comparative and sentences that focus on the core bring positive influences because they make Chinese more clear, direct and rigid in expressing ideas. Third, "Be" sentence and change of lexical category are neutral and should be decided by specific circumstances.At last, the present study has the following conclusions:First, reverse transfer is sure to have taken place at Chinese exclamatory sentence structure level. Second, generally speaking, negative, neutral and positive influences all exist in emotional conceptual transfer of English on Chinese, but in light of the fact that those negative problems have entered into restructuring or convergence level, it is advised to keep an eye on and be cautious about them. Third, as language transfer is bidirectional, it is suggested to research emotional conceptual transfer differences from both forward and reverse angle.