英语论文网

Chapter Ⅰ Introduction

1.1 Research background
In this thesis, we contrast Chinese reduplicative pluractional construction “yue lai yue ”andEnglish reduplicative pluractional construction “comparative degree and comparative degree”,trying to find out the similarities and differences between them by collecting and analyzing a greatnumber of data from the corpora. Through analyzing these similarities and differences, we tryto find their influences on English teaching. Considering these influences, we put forward somesuggestions of efficient teaching methods of English for Chinese English teachers.Contrastive research between languages has attracted great attention in second languageacquisition. In the early stage, contrastive research focused on the foundation level or“micro-linguistics”, which focused on grammar and lexicon level; and in its following stage,contrastive research focused on the upper level or “macro-linguistics”, which focused on thediscourse. No matter how to develop, the aim of contrastive research is to describe thesimilarities and differences within different languages systematically. If one wants to conductcontrastive research systematically, two elements are necessary, a tremendous corpus base and anequivalent language unit. While a tremendous corpus is easy to get, it is much difficult to definean equivalent language unit. When a word or a grammar phenomenon is chosen to be a unit,contrastive research will trend to compare the grammar form and the limited lexical meaning.On the contrary, when a passage or a whole essay is chosen to be a unit, contrastive research willtrend to compare the lexical meaning and the implicated meaning. Neither unit is acomprehensive or systematic research. In order to give consideration to two things, contrastiveresearch needs a new unit, and construction is a good choice. Construction is a term derivedfrom construction grammar, and it integrates form and meaning in conventionalized way andintegrates some aspects in non-compositional ways.
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1.2 Significance of the study
In view of the vital position of “comparative degree and comparative degree” in Englishlearning, it is essential to find an effective way to learn for Chinese English learners. ForChinese English learners, Chinese is their mother tongue. Therefore, the influence of theirmother tongue should be considered seriously in finding an efficient way to learn Englishexpressions. Lado (1957) declared in the preface of his book Linguistics Across Culture that“Individuals tend to transfer the forms and meanings and the distributions of forms and meaningsof their native language and culture to the foreign language and culture-both productively whenattempting to speak the language and to act in the culture and receptively when attempting tograsp and understand the language and the culture as practiced by natives”. Kellerman (1986)also suggested that the term “language influence” be restricted to “those processes that lead to theincorporation of elements from one language into another”. In order to analyze the influence ofmother tongue for Chinese English learners in English learning, it is necessary to do the researchon the Contrastive Analysis of English “comparative degree and comparative degree”and thesimilar structure “yue lai yue” in Chinese. By analyzing the similarities and differences betweenthem, the potential influence of Chinese on English learning will be analyzed