Reverse Transfer Of Syntax From L2 To L1

Language transfer is a common issue in the field of second language acquisition.It refers to the influences that result from similarities and differences between two closely contacted languages.There are generally two directions of language transfer,between which the influences of learners' L2 on L1 are usually termed as reverse transfer.At present,as English has become a dominant language worldwide,studies on the influences of English on Chinese have become one of the most heated issues being discussed.For this reason,this study,by reviewing the previous studies,will take Chinese English-major college students as subjects for the analysis of the syntactic features brought about by English transfer in their Chinese writings.Accordingly,two corpora were constructed for this study,one was the target corpus,a collection of Chinese compositions written by English majors,and the other was made up of a large set of writings written by Chinese monolingual native writers,functioning as a comparative corpus.Based on the analysis of typical Chinese structures influenced by English,through the comparison of their frequencies of occurrence in two annotated corpora,this study attempted to systematically analyze the influence of L2(English)on Chinese syntactic competence of those English-major students in China.To be specific,this study mainly explored the following three research questions:(1)Are there any reverse transfers from L2 to L1 at phrasal level?If yes,what are they?(2)Are there any reverse transfers from L2 to L1 at clausal level?If yes,what are they?(3)Are there any reverse transfers from L2 to L1 at sentential level?If yes.what are they?In this study,the data in two corpora were collected with the assistance of WordSmith 5.0 and AntConc 3.2.1;frequency and chi-square test were used to compare the value of each syntactic feature occurring in two corpora.The findings showed that long-term English learning can observably influence Chinese writings of English majors,which can be specifically illustrated in three dimensions:(1)the increased use of copular verb "shi" at phrasal level;(2)at clausal level,shortening of average length of T-unit indicating the reduced syntactic complexity and writing proficiency,and the increased use of modifying clauses with head nouns,attributives with name or pronoun as subject and positional change of Chinese adverbial clause of reason;(3)at sentential level,the overall features are the extension of mean length of utterance and extended use of "bei"(a passive voice marker in Chinese)sentence.