An Investigation On The Syntactic Complexity Of Second Language Learners Based On Dependence Distance

Under the theoretical framework of dependence grammar,this thesis uses dependence distance as a measurement method.It uses the composition of elementary,intermediate,and advanced Chinese learners from three Confucius Institutes in Morocco as the research sample,and uses the computer to input text and process it to construct the learner’s composition.Dependency tree bank,by calculating the dependency distance to investigate the change characteristics of the syntactic complexity of learners at different stages.The corpus text contains a total of 30 Chinese narratives,which are constructed into three dependency tree banks,each containing 10 essays of each level.The corpus tagging software Stanford Parser 3.6.0is used for the analysis and tagging of part of speech and dependence.The quantitative data obtained is processed with Excel 2016 and SPSS 22.0 is used for analysis.This study investigated the syntactic complexity of the composition of learners of different Chinese proficiency through the calculation of the dependence distance.Through the calculation of the average dependence distance and absolute dependence distance,the syntactic complexity is explored from the two aspects of adjacent dependence and non-adjacent dependence,and on this basis,the composition text is further analyzed from the main syntactic relationship of subject,object,attributive and adverbial Descriptive analysis of the complexity of the syntax.The research found that: 1)The average dependence distance in composition increases with the improvement of learners’ Chinese proficiency,indicating that the syntactic complexity of learners’ Chinese writing will increase with the improvement of Chinese proficiency;2)From low-level composition to high-level composition In the composition,there are fewer and fewer neighboring dependencies,and more and more non-neighboring long dependency distances.This shows that with the improvement of Chinese proficiency,learners are more inclined to use more complicated syntactic structures;3)With the improvement of Chinese proficiency,the main syntactic relations of subject,object,adverbial and attributive in the composition of learners are all complicated.Increased;4)Pronouns and nouns help to promote the increase of the average dependence distance of the subject components in different levels of composition texts.Nouns and joint phrases mainly affect the increase of the average dependence distance of object constituents in different levels of composition texts.Prepositional phrases and adverbs play a positive role in promoting the average dependence distance of adverbial components in different levels of composition text.Quantifiers and "的" phrases help increase the average dependence distance of attributive components in different levels of composition text.This research further explores the enlightenment of the above findings on Chinese teaching and writing,and puts forward some tentative suggestions that are conducive to syntax teaching.At the same time,I hope to bring some enlightenment to the teaching and research of syntax and writing carried out by foreign Chinese learners in the future.