English-major Students' Acquisition Of English Functional Category T

The proposal of the Minimalist Program(MP) makes a number of linguists realize that the fundamental discrepancies between languages consist in the functional categories and their componential features. Therefore, the marking of functional categories in second language learners'(L2ers') interlanguage syntactic system has been a significant topic discussed in second language acquisition(SLA). Particularly, the acquisition of verbal inflectional morphology associated with English functional category T(tense) by L2 ers has attracted considerable attention both at home and abroad. In the course of SLA, L2 ers, especially the beginners, frequently omit and misuse functional category T in their spoken and written English. Moreover, such phenomenon seems to persistently occur in the whole process of second language learning and the causes behind it deserve more attention and deeper discussion.Within the theoretical framework of MP, the present thesis, by choosing the written texts from Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(2.0) as the source of linguistic data, examines the marking of English verbal inflectional morphology associated with functional category T by English majors, in order to see whether they omit and misuse verbal inflection in their compositions, and meanwhile, to explore the potential relation between the omission of verbal inflection and interlanguage grammar(ILG) impairment, and to further discuss the possible causes concerning why some L2 ers usually omit and incorrectly use verbal inflection in their ILGs.Based on data analysis, the results obtained are as follows. First of all, in our empirical study, English majors do omit and misuse the 3rd person singular present-tense and past-tense markings in their ILGs to some extent. As their English proficiency level improves, they have better performance in using verbal inflectional morphology(3rd person singular present tense –s and past tense –(e)d) on thematic verbs. L2 ers, by and large, perform better in the use of present-tense verbal inflection –s than that of past-tense inflection –(e)d. Secondly, they can distinguish the finite forms from nonfinite ones, and their distribution of the finite and nonfinite verbal forms is not random. Only nonfinite forms are used where finite forms are expected, while no finite verbal forms occur where nonfinite ones are expected. Thus, the feature [±finite] of English functional category T is fully specified in their ILGs. Finally, they all place the thematic verbs on the right of negator not(n't) and VP-adverbs, and meanwhile, the finite clauses in their written English all have overt subjects and the pronominal subjects are all assigned the nominative case. The above results indicate that functional category T is present in English majors' ILGs. In the meantime, their interlanguage syntactic system is unimpaired and the feature-checking mechanism can operate well.The phenomenon of missing inflection could be discussed and explained within Distributed Morphology. According to the Subset Principle, Chinese L2 ers may have difficulty in selecting the best suitable vocabulary item and inserting it into a certain syntactic node. They cannot always associate 3rd person singular present-tense and past-tense marking with the concept of “present” and “past” respectively, which results in their failure to insert appropriate verbal forms into the corresponding syntactic nodes. In addition, L2ers' omission and misuse of verbal inflection in their interlanguage may also be accounted for from the perspectives of the implementation of Agree, effects of L1 transfer, writing anxiety and sentence types. The research results of the thesis provide some positive implications for English teaching and learning.