A Study On The Acquisition Of Expletive It And There Of English Raising Verbs In The Interface Of Syntax And Semantic Among Middle School Students

English raising verbs,such as seem,appear,and happen to are included in the vocabulary list in the English Curricular Standards.In the literature,expletive it and there of the English raising verbs are difficult for the students to acquire.However,only Xie Yuanhua(2009,2015)has done an empirical research on the acquisition of expletive it and there of the English raising verbs,but her subjects are not middle school students.Therefore,it becomes necessary for me to take 147 students from Zhangzhou Experimental school in Fujian Province as my research subjects.They are from Junior Three,Senior One and Senior Two,who represent three levels of English proficiency.With the help of a questionnaire of Grammatical Judgement Task(GJT),the data from my subjects is put into SPSS 21.0.The result of one-way ANOVA,two-way ANOVA and simple effect analysis has found the following discoveries:(1)There exists significant differences on the acquisition of expletive it and there between the different levels of students and different English raising verbs;(2)There are significant differences in the expletive it of non-raising constructions between low level and middle level,low level and high level of English proficiency.And in the raising constructions only low levels and high levels of English proficiency students show significant differences on expletive there.There are significant differences on expletive it in the raising constructions between three levels;(3)Different levels of students can't acquire the expletive it and there of English raising verbs at the syntax and semantic interface.Therefore,teachers should teach their students expletive it and there of raising verbs according to the levels of their proficiency and the contexts of the teaching materials.Secondly,teachers should make good use of Cross-linguistic similarity to help students understand the semantic mismatch between the subject and the raising verbs.As for students,they should learn how to classify and compare expletive it in the non-raising constructions and raising constructions.Lastly,students should pay attention to intentional learning and incidental learning.