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

Download or read book Acquisition of the Perfective Aspect Marker "le" of Mandarin Chinese in Discourse by American College Learners written by Lixia Ma and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.