The Acquisition Of English Existential Sentence By Senior High School Students

In recent thirty years,the study of English existential sentence stays a main aspect in the field of linguistics and second language acquisition.Though,a great number of scholars including at home and abroad have investigated this sentence structure.Yet,most of their studies focus on the theoretical aspect.So far,the subjects of most domestic studies about the acquisition of English existential sentence are English or non-English major students,or students in Hong Kong and Taiwan.Based on the theoretical foundation of the Universal Grammar and Subset Principle,the present study manages to examine the acquisition of English existential sentence of 90 senior high school students from Huizhou No.1 Middle School.This study tries to answer the following three questions:1.Can learners use existential construction correctly when it contains the relative pronoun or participle?2.Can learners not obey the constraint of using indefinite subject in the existential sentence?3.Can learners use other existential verbs except “be”?By using one-way ANOVA in SPSS19.0 to analyze the collecting data from a questionnaire,there comes the major findings of this study:The scores are different according to different grades.The higher grades,the higher scores.However,none of them can get a good score,which means all the three grades students cannot master the English existential sentence well.The findings prove that only under the circumstance of sufficient positive evidence,can learners get to the superset grammar from the subset grammar.Regarding to the function in second language acquisition,the Universal Grammar has only partial effect.This outcome supports the fifth theory which proposed by White,that is partial access/partial transfer.This study shows that on the basis of the Universal Grammar and Subset Principle,teachers should make reasonable teaching plans that can expose the students in a large amount of positive evidence in order to help students to reach the superset grammar successfully.