Investigating The Acquisition Of Period And Comma In Chinese With Discourse Cohesive Function

This thesis starts from the error analysis of the Malaysian students' use of Chinese punctuation.Their errors will be explained and illustrated from the perspective of linguistic motivations.This thesis will further analyze the reasons of those errors in depth from the perspective of discourse grammar,so as to understand Malaysian students'acquisition process of Chinese punctuation as well as the factors that influence the acquisition.Punctuation plays an important role in discourse construction.As Mr ZHU Dexi and Mr LV Shuxiang stressed in the gramatical hetoric speech:"Every punctuation has a unique effect,its function is no less than real Chinese characters." Punctuation can indicate the tone,show the speech pauses to some extent,and further indicate the nature of language units and the relationship between them.From the perspective of discourse grammar,punctuation is an effective means of discourse cohesion,and reflects the deep semantic logic relations in discourse.Therefore,the existence and the use of punctuation has its linguistic motivation,and its specific rules contain linguistic principles.Although punctuation for discourse expression is of great importance,at present academia has not pay enough attention to L2 learners' use of Chinese punctuation marks,and the punctuation acquisition process.Thus,even for an advanced Chinese language learners,there are still a lot of punctuation errors in compositions.Based on the fact mentioned above,this thesis will examine L2 learners' use of Chinese punctuation marks from the perspective of discourse grammar,analyze the causes of the errors from the perspective of linguistic motivations and try to find out the deep mechanism behind the punctuation errors.Combined with interviews,the author intends to understand Malaysian students'acquisition process of Chinese punctuation marks and the factors affecting the acquisition.This paper consists of seven chapters,in which Chapter Three to Six are the main body of this thesis.The first chapter is introduction,which introduces the origin,theoretical basis,research ideas and methods of this paper.The source of corpus and the principle of corpus annotation are also detailed in this part.In addition,this chapter gives an overall picture of the Chinese punctuation errors made by Malaysian students.The errors will be profiled from the perspectives of types of errors and the errors related factors respectively.The second chapter is literature review,which explains the theoretical basis of this thesis and previous researches on relevant issues.Literature review includes the review of theoretical basis of second language acquisition the discourse analysis,discourse function of punctuation marks,and studies on L2 learners'acquisition of Chinese punctuation.This chapter is a detailed review of second language acquisition,discourse analysis,L2 acquisition of Chinese punctuation,and textual function of punctuation.In the third chapter,the usage of punctuation marks and their linguistic principles in regard to punctuation marks and topic chains are discussed.As an important means and unit of textual cohesion,the topic chain is cohesive inside,so period,which has a partition function,cannot be inserted within a topic chain;between topic chains,the semantic distance is very loose,so it is possible to choose a comma or a period according to the form of anaphora.Chapter Three focuses on the relationship between topic chain,anaphora and the use of punctuation marks,which forms the theoretical basis of the analysis of Malaysian students' topic chain relevant punctuation errors.The fourth chapter focuses on punctuation and textual connection components.In this chapter,conjunctions,adverbs and pronouns of "?(Qi)" kind are used as clues,to examine the practical use of Chinese punctuation marks.The data produced by Malaysian students will be compared with that of native speakers through corpora and related tools statistically.In this way,punctuation errors associated with cohesion components are illustrated,and the features and causes of the errors in the composition are also analyzed and summarized.The fifth chapter focuses on punctuation and other related factors.In this part,the Chinese aspect mark "?(zhe)",the comma omission after the first adverbial clause and the comma redundancy are analyzed and discussed.Chapter Six is the exploration of the reasons of punctuation errors and related teaching implicature.In this chapter,interview results of Malaysian students are demonstrated.Combined with previous statistical analysis and examples of typical errors,the cognitive features in the process of use and learning of students are analyzed in depth.In addition,based on the results and the analysis,the causes of the punctuation errors of Malaysian students in their Chinese writing are analyzed through linguistic motivation theories,which,to a certain extent,outlines the process of Malaysian students' learning Chinese punctuation and summarizes the factors that affect the acquisition.The seventh chapter is conclusion,which summarizes the whole thesis and demonstrates the significance,limitations and direction for future research.