A Cross-Sectional Investigation on French Students’ Mandarin Composition Errors: Zero Anaphora, Copula and Determiners
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Lin, Ching-Yeh
Abstract
While the contrastive analysis and the discourse analysis in English learners of Chinese as a foreign or second language has been extensively investigated, comparison study of French and Chinese is relatively unexplored. French is precise and rich in morphology inflection. There are strict grammatical rules for the use of the pronoun, the verb, and the article in writing. First, French is a subject-prominent language. The subject usually cannot be omitted, and the pronoun is the pivotal cohesive device that creates coherence in texts. Second, the adjective cannot directly be predicated, and the verb etre (‘to be’) is obligatory in a predicate adjective. Third, the article which indicates the noun being determinate or indeterminate is always required. However, Chinese is economical and analytical in morphology. The use of the zero pronoun, the copula and the determiner is quite flexible. Chinese is a topic-prominent language. The subject can be omitted and the clauses in a topic chain are usually linked by zero anaphora. Besides, the copula shi (‘to be’) is not always obligatory. In Chinese, the predicate adjectives do not use a copula unless the copula as a marker of special affirmation. Moreover, the bare noun without the determiner can be determinate or indeterminate based on the word order and the context. The essential goal of this study is to examine if the above-mentioned differences between French and Mandarin Chinese lead to CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) learners’ learning difficulties. This research focuses on the writing errors. A total of 90 CFL learners’ compositions of the final examination from Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO) were collected for this study. The compositions were categorized into three proficiency levels. The learners’ writing errors were examined from the perspectives of quantitative and qualitative research. The main findings of the this study show the elementary learners overused pronouns for the accuracy, and this phenomenon rendered the context to be unnatural; in contrast, the intermediate and advanced learners overused zero anaphora for the economy in language, and this situation caused the context ambiguity. However, the error rates of the copula and determiners are lower than expected, and the cause is worthy of further investagation. Based on the results of this study, pedagogical implications for French learners and suggestions for the future study are provided.
Subjects
Anaphora Zero Anaphor
Copula
Bare Noun
a/an+(Classifier)+Noun
Error Analysis
Type
thesis
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