Research On Either "X" Or "Y" In The Teaching Of Chinese As A Foreign Language

The research object of this paper is to study the modern Chinese sentence structure "either X, or Y" commonly used in the spoken language. It investigates the characteristics of the "either X, or Y" from Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics level; and it studies the grammatical properties of that sentence structure in various usages and its expressive function. Besides, this paper makes a comparative analysis about the sentence structure "either X, or Y" by comparing it with other relevant sentence structures. On this basis, this paper studies the usage of the sentence structure "either X, or Y " among the students abroad and makes an analysis about the phenomenon of errors in it. Accordingly, this paper will put forward the relevant teaching suggestions and teaching approaches.The content of this paper is divided into the following three parts:The first part is the introduction to the whole thesis in the Chapter One. Firstly, it presents the research object and the research significance of this thesis. Besides, it introduces the previous studies of the sentence structure "either X, or Y" abroad and at home and the research limitations about the previous studies. And lastly the research method and the material collection are stated in this chapter.The second part is from the Chapter two to the Chapter four and it is the main part of this thesis. The Chapter Two presents a research of the sentence structure "either X, or Y" from the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic level. At the level of semantics, as the enumerated two terms, the "X" and "Y" in the sentence structure "either X, or Y" present various semantic relations with its subsequent components, including the irrelevant relations, transition relations, concessions, and domination relations. At the level of syntax, the "X" and "Y" can be words, word phrases and clauses. The terms which the "either...or..." are collocated with can be two terms or the multiterms. Besides, the position of the "X" and "Y" is free. At the level of the pragmatics, this sentence structure has three kinds of functions of the discourse markers which refer to the function of concessions, the function of interim and the function of simulated dialogue besides the pragmatical effects such as the illustrative function, contrastive function/salient function and the function of tone-easing. The chapter three concludes the types of the errors about the sentence structure "either X, or Y" and the reasons for causing the errors through the investigation on the usages of the sentence structure "either X, or Y" used by students aboard. The author of this paper puts forward that the language teachers should pay more attention to the words which are relevant to the "X"and "Y" and their collocations in the teaching procedure of the sentence structure "either X,or Y" teaching. Based on the ontological study about the sentence structure "either X,or Y"and the error analysis made by students abroad, the chapter four puts forward two kinds of teaching approaches referring to the focusing teaching method classified by the types of errors and the grammatical teaching approach so that the students abroad can master this oral sentence structure and reduce the occurrence of errors.The third part is the conclusion part. It summarizes the findings of this paper.