The Right Periphery in L2 Chinese

The Right Periphery in L2 Chinese
Author: Shanshan Yan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2022-12-29
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1000819515

The Right Periphery in L2 Chinese is among the first books to try to incorporate both advanced linguistic and acquisition perspectives to show how eight sentence-final particles are represented in English-speaking learners’ L2 Chinese. This book will inform researchers of the general construction of the right periphery in L2 grammars. Drawing on up-to-date theoretical frameworks and findings from advanced empirical studies, it sketches the general picture of the periphery that these particles occupy in English-Chinese interlanguages. Readers will grasp the problems and difficulties, and particularly the ambiguities, which learners of Chinese must grapple with in the process of acquiring sentence-final particles. Possible influential factors underlying the acquisition process are explicitly discussed as well. Researchers will also find insights in the advanced methodologies and statistics that are used to study Chinese. The book will be illuminating for researchers interested in SLA, linguists of generative theories, and educators teaching Chinese as a second/foreign language.

Acquisition of the Perfective Aspect Marker "le" of Mandarin Chinese in Discourse by American College Learners

Acquisition of the Perfective Aspect Marker
Author: Lixia Ma
Publisher:
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2006
Genre: Chinese language
ISBN:

The Chinese perfective aspect marker le is one of the most challenging yet very important grammatical features for learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). Based on the observation that there was a lack of width in the study of this feature in the earlier research, the current study presents a new perspective at the discourse level to achieve a more in-depth understanding of the acquisition of le. In response to the obvious need to obtain data on the acquisition of this linguistic feature with a global view, the current thesis study starts with the discourse functions of le, and eventually providing an encompassing guideline in learning le at the prosodic, syntactic, semantic and discourse level in linguistics. Three instruments (UI Placement Test-Grammar Section, Knowledge Test, and Production Test) were administered to 95 American college CFL learners of four different proficiency levels and to 30 native speakers of Chinese as controls.

Stance in Talk

Stance in Talk
Author: Ruey-Jiuan Wu
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2004
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027253590

Guided by the methodology of conversation analysis (CA), this book explores how participants in Mandarin conversation display stance in the unfolding development of action and interaction, and, in particular, how this is accomplished through the use of two Mandarin final particles. Through a close examination of the sequential environments of these two particles and the interactional work accomplished by their use, the research presented in this book seeks to demonstrate how a participant-oriented, action-based micro approach to data can help us gain analytic leverage in understanding the functions and meanings of these particles – an area which has long posed a challenge to Chinese linguists. On the other hand, in utilizing a CA-based framework applied to Mandarin, this study also seeks to contribute to conversation analytic research by revealing previously uninvestigated language-specific phenomena while at the same time showing how talk-in-interaction in a non-western language, i.e., Mandarin, can also display the same striking systematicity and orderliness as observed in many western languages. As one of the pioneering CA studies of Mandarin, this book will be of interest to researchers in Chinese linguistics and conversation analysis, as well as those in fields which touch upon the relationships between languages and cultures.