中国的外语学习者习得英语名词的难点
本探讨从中国英语学习者学习英语名词数的语法信息的实际困难出发，通过语言迁移理论和标记理论来了解学习者习得英语名词数的语法信息困难的深层原因。汉、英两种语言分属于不同的语系，英语论文题目，表达习惯也不尽相同。汉语名词没有数范畴，普遍用量词来计数或者用“们”、“些”等词来表示数的概念。
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Rationale of the present study
Since English is widely learned as a foreign language in the mainland of China, English dictionaries are considered as inseparable companions for scholars,teachers and students,especially English-Chinese learner’s dictionaries which is a good helper of English foreign language(EFL)learners.Due to the fact that English dictionaries and English-Chinese dictionaries are so popular in the dictionary market,learners’needs are given greater priority in compiling dictionaries.Just as what Henry Widdowson said in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary（Hornby,2017）(OALD):Instructing the learner is the responsibility of OALD,whose value is estimated by its usefulness.So dictionary compiling should be carried out from users’perspective.The study tries to find out a proper way to present grammatical information in number of English nouns in English-Chinese learner’s dictionaries from English-Chinese learners’perspective.
1.1.1 Learners’difficulties in learning English nouns
Chinese and English belong to different language families,so they often have different forms of expression.Chinese has no definite grammatical category of number and almost has no number inflection.Plural meaning is often implied in the syntactic structure or in the context by bare noun.And plural meaning can also be expressed by the suffix“们”,numerical adjectives such as many,numerous and each,quantifiers, and reduplications.
The grammatical number of English nouns,however,is far more complicated than that of Chinese nouns.According to lexical meaning,English nouns can be divided into common nouns and proper nouns.Common nouns are further classified into concrete nouns and abstract nouns.Concrete nouns are fallen into class nouns and material nouns. And class nouns are sorted into individual nouns and collective nouns.According to grammatical form,nouns are often divided into countable nouns and uncountable nouns.
Landau(1984)has pointed out that native English speakers can turn the theoretical uncountable nouns into countable ones.There is no absolute boundary between countable nouns and uncountable nouns.Given that different languages have different grammatical features,the actual test for which nouns are uncountable may vary between languages.In English,uncountable nouns are characterized by the fact that they cannot be directly modified by a numeral without specifying a unit of measurement,and that they cannot combine with an indefinite article(a or an).Thus,the mass noun“water” is quantified as“30 liters of water”while the count noun“book”is quantified as“30 books”.However,uncountable nouns(like count nouns)can be quantified in relative terms without unit specification(e.g.,“much water,”“many chairs”). Some uncountable nouns can be used in English in plural form to mean“a large amount of”–for example,“The fish can live only in deep waters.”In such cases although water is uncountable,it has plural form.
Chinese advanced learners are often confused by the questions that whether a noun is countable or uncountable,when to use its single/plural form,and if it is used as subject,it is followed by a single predicate or a plural one.These questions often puzzle the EFL learners including the Chinese advanced English learners.Owing to the diff，英语论文范文 |
