An X-bar Theory To Investigate Negative Structures Acquisition Of Middle School Students

This research chooses students whose language is native Chinese as the object, adopts quantitative analysis methods, and analyzes the acquisition of English negative structures based on X-bar Theory. It analyses the question of sensitivity, and the error types of English negative structures in junior and senior high school students.The paper carries on investigation research on whether middle and high school students have sensitivity towards English negative structures on the basis of X-bar Theory. We divide the subject into junior school group and senior school group, who are asked to answer a questionnaire, which includes multiple choices tasks and translation tasks. The multiple choices are to verify the sensitivities towards English negative structures. And the translation tasks are designed to investigate the different error types of senior and junior high school students, also to verify whether learners can acquire the inflectional category in the initial stage of English negative structure acquiring. Then the data are analyzed through SPSS and the analysis for the data are presented.This paper draws conclusions through analysis and discussion: firstly, students have sensitivity towards X-bar Theory, that is, they reject sentences that are against X-bar Theory, and accept those which are accord with X-bar Theory. Secondly, students can’t acquire functional categories in the initial states of English negative structure acquisition, that is, the functional and inflectional categories are absent in this period. Thirdly, the paper verifies the differences of sensitivity between junior and senior high school students, and between boy students and girl students. Then the paper draws the conclusion that students are sensitive to the X-bar Theory, but the sensitivity differs from the junior and senior high school students. That is to say, learner can acquire X-bar Theory better only when they reach a certain kind of English level. Fourth, the paper analyzes the error types of English negative structures and the reasons and suggestions accounting for that, and helps students trigger their confidence and learn negative structures better.