The Study Of Transfer Phenomenon Of Korean (L1) And English (L2) Learners On Chinese (L3) Prepositional Phrases

This paper researches third language acquisition for Korean students of Mandarin Chinese in regard to learning prepositional phrases.All research participants were native Korean speakers(L1),with English as their second language(L2)and Mandarin Chinese as their third language(L3).In the initial stages of research,it has compared the linguistic typology features of three languages: Chinese,English,and Korean.Findings showed that although Mandarin Chinese largely follows the Subject – Verb – Object(SVO)structure,it has features of both SVO and Subject – Object – Verb(SOV)languages,in particular that prepositional phrases can function as adverbials when placed in the middle of the sentence.Mandarin Chinese was found to be similar to the Korean SOV structure with a “adverbial + predicate” word order;this was in contrast to English which follows a “predicate + adverbial” word order.When prepositional phrases functioned as an attributive,Mandarin Chinese again followed the Korean SOV structure rather than the English SVO structure.It can therefore be concluded that Korean(L1)and Mandarin Chinese(L3)are linguistically more similar.This raised the question as to whether Korean students of Mandarin Chinese would then be influenced by the English.Participants were divided into two groups;Korean learners of Mandarin Chinese in Korea(the “Korea Group”),and Korean learners of Mandarin Chinese in China(the “China Group”).Both groups undertook a Language Background Test,and a Mandarin Chinese Prepositional Phrases Transfer Test.The main findings were as follows:1.Participants use English word order rules directly in Chinese sentence,and sinc e Korean prepositional phrases have free word order,sometimes even Korean word order rules are directly substituted into Chinese sentence.Participants also had a stronger tendency to place the “adverbial in the middle of the sentence”,showing that regardless of being in Korea or in China,Korean learners of Ma ndarin Chinese have an advantage in acquiring prepositional phrases.2.Learning environment,the length of time learning English,language psychologi cal type and language levels in both English and Mandarin Chinese were all f actors affecting prepositional phrase transfer.It could not be proven that “recen t use of language” had any effect.3.Based on the number of sentences influenced by Korean language("Korean N")and the number influenced by English language("English N"),both groups we re found to overall be more influenced by the differences between English and Mandarin Chinese than Korean and Mandarin Chinese.