Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
English Existential Construction (hereinafter EEC) is a special type of sentencestructure which claims the existence of something. It is frequently used by all levelsof people both within spoken and written English. Although native English speakerscan use it naturally, it remains a problematic area for L2 learners of English. EEC hasbecome a hotly-discussed issue because of its own popularity, particularity andcomplexity for a long time and has drawn much attention of linguistic scholars both athome and abroad. Therefore, a variety of linguistic theories and approaches have beenadopted to study EEC.Historically, three approaches have been applied to the study of this issue:Descriptive Approach, Generative Approach and Functional Approach. Each of themhas made their own contributions to the study of this issue from distinctiveperspectives. Descriptive linguists aim to describe the features and functions of EEC,which only superficially explains what EEC is without concerning about why it is so.In order to solve this problem, Generative linguists try to analyze the structure of EEC.According to their analysis, English Existential Construction is generated from anunderlying syntactic structure in which there is the surface structure used to fill thedeep structure—the real subject. Functional approach emphasizes on the languagefunctions of EEC by analyzing the thematic structure of this special sentence structure.It views EEC as a process of information transfer. Based on this concept, Halliday(1994:37) takes the view point that there is a theme which “severs as the point ofdeparture of the message”.
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1.2 Significances of the Study
English Existential Construction is a kind of sentence structure which is appliedfor expressing the appearance or disappearance of something. As a special languagestructure in English grammar, it has been invested more and more attention amongscholars. The theoretical study of EEC is always a research focus among linguists,while only a few scholars devote their energy in the acquisition of this grammaticalstructure. Therefore, it is necessary to spare some effort to discuss and solve thisproblem. Based on the previous studies, the present research is going to explore andanalyze Chinese students’ acquisition on EEC from an empirical angle, which aims tofind out the sequence when Chinese students acquire English existential construction,or in other words, to check which kind of structures they prefer to use in the first place.Theoretically, based on the previous studies, the present study syntacticallyclassifies English existential construction as five main categories: 1) “there be”structure; 2) “there / unaccusative verbs” structure; 3) “there / to do” structure; 4)“there / for…to…” structure; 5) “there / relative clause” structure. Each category canbe divided into two or three sub-categories, so there are 10 categories together, whichprovide further theoretical supports for analyzing the collecting data from students.From the practical point of view, an empirical study is implemented thoughcollecting students’ output of English existential construction. In this study, thesequence of different structures of English existential construction acquired byChinese senior high school students is regarded as an important topic. The autho，英语论文题目，英语论文范文
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