Chinese Interference in Learning English Verbs1.doc

Chinese Interference in Learning English VerbsMother tongue interference is defined as the use of elements from one's native language while learning a second one. Instances of Chinese interference in English learning can be found at the level of pronunciation, morphology, syntax, vocabulary and meaning. English and Chinese verbs, although similar in many aspects, have some subtle but significant differences in semantic composition, bringing difficulties to Chinese students in learning English verbs. 1. The semantic composition of verbs According to Websters New World Dictionary, a verb is "a word that characteristically is the grammatical center of a predicate and expresses an act, occurrence, or mode of being.”. From this definition we can see that the semantic function of a verb is to describe a motion, may it be an act, occurrence, or mode of being. However, motion itself cannot make up a motion event. There are other elements associated with motion such as direction (as in "take" and "bring"), manner (as in "prance”), aspect (as in “restart”) and so on. All these associative elements, together with motion, constitute a motion complex. Semantic elements are realized by linguistic structures of various forms. A motion complex is expressed by what we call a verb complex, which comprises the head verb, the particle and the reflection. Since reflection is more concerned with grammar, we will limit ourselves to a consideration of the first two. Therefore, here we have two sets, as are illustrated in the following: Set A (motion complex) Set B (verb complex) motion head verb manner particle direction cause result . Noticeably, these two sets, that is, the semantic composition and its linguistic form, are seldom in one-to-one correspondence. In some cases a motion complex is realized by a single head verb, which is termed incorporation. e.g. He cupped his hands and I poured some water into them. "Cup" means "to form (esp. the hands) into the shape of a cup", which depicts both motion and manner. However, sometimes a single verb is incapable of depicting a motion complex, in which case particles are used in conjunction with the head verb, indicating direction, manner, aspect, and so on. e.g. I ran in. Many direction verbs in Chinese like "上去", "下来" are cases in point. In the following sections we will discuss how the head verb functions in fulfilling incorporation and how the particle plays an important part in the verb complex. 2. A comparison of incorporation between English and Chinese head verbs 2.1 Incorporation is abundant in language. Let's see some examples from English and Chinese: English verb Chinese equivalent Meaning (interpretation) to saw 锯 to cut with a saw 用锯子切割 to target to aim at a target 把.作为目标 to trudge to walk with heavy steps 步履沉重地走 to clutter to make untidy or confused, esp. by filling with useless or unwanted things 乱七八糟地堆 After a brief comparison we can say that incorporation is quite common with English verbs, whereas in many cases the exact Chinese equivalents to these incorporate verbs cannot be found. To encode the meaning, Chinese relies on other sentence elements like adverbial and complement in the above examples. Now we have arrived at a major difference between English and Chinese verbs, that is, the English is rich in incorporate verbs which allow a greater semantic specificity and thus a vivid description of the motion complex, whereas in Chinese incorporation is not so common. Instead, it is often the case that to portray a motion complex, the associative elements are separately coded by other sentence elements. This conclusion could be illustrated as following: Subject sentence elements object other than the verb complement adverbial English . sentence motion the incorporate verb direction associative elements manner result sentence elements subject other than the verb object . Chinese sentence elements adverbial direction Sentence that realize the complement (to indicate) manner associative elements particle result in a motion complex the general verb motion This also explains the claim that English vocabularies, relatively speaking, are semantically opaque, whereas Chinese ones have a greater degree of transparency. (It is important to note that transparency is the end-point of a continuum of degrees of opacity, much as "cleanness" is the end-point of "degrees of dirtiness".) 2.2 To get a comprehensive understanding of incorporation of English verbs and their equivalent Chinese expressions, a careful examination is in order. Here we classify incorporation into several types: A. incorporation from N-V Conversion William Morris and Marry Morris pointed out in their Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (1975):"The conversion of nouns to verbs is a form of linguistic change as old as the language itself." Since 1980s, N-V Conversion has been drawing attention as a new trend of Modern English, demonstrated in the following remarks: "One of the fastest-growing trends is verbing (or the practice of converting nouns into verbs). A few years ago would you have attended a meeting and dared to say you had categorised your subject? Then time-lined and agendaed it? Yet you hear this constantly in education and business, Matters are resourced and targeted." (Educational Age / 1985) Randolph Quirk gave seven categories of N-V Conversion in his A Grammar of Contemporary English (1973). Just take one of them as an example. To put in/on N e.g. bottle (to put into a bottle/(把.)装进瓶子) The motion complex realized in the verb "bottle" can be interpreted as "motion + path + ground". However, from its Chinese translation we can see that in Chinese it is separated into two parts, that is, a general verb "装" and complement "进瓶子". B.Motion + manner e.g. He devoured all the biscuits. 他狼吞虎咽地吃完了所有的饼干。 "Devour" means "to eat hungrily and in large quantities so that nothing remains", which is expressed in Chinese by a general verb "吃", an adverbial "狼吞虎咽地" and a complement "完". Actually "motion + manner" type covers most specific verbs in English, whose vividness and freshness have become a feature of the English language. It is worthy of note that the same motion in conjunction with different manners unfolds different pictures of the motion complex. That explains why English has large numbers of synonyms, which share a central conceptual meaning (motion) but differ in manner, intensity, style, association, and so on. No wonder the British linguist F. Palmer said, “There are no real synonyms and no true words have the same meaning.” To highlight the subtle differences among synonyms, a componential analysis would be of help. For instance, when we intend to express "笑" in English, the most possible word that comes to our Chinese mind is "laugh" or "smile", the most general ones of its kind. Actually, we have a series of synonyms to choose from according to a given context, analyzed below: chuckle: + laugh + quietly giggle: + laugh + silly + repeatedly + uncontrollably sniggle: + laugh + half suppressed grin: + laugh + teeth-shown guffaw: + laugh + loudly + perhaps rudely The two types of incorporation so far listed are the most important and common ones in the English language. Besides, we have some other types that will be sketched below: C.Motion + direction e.g. lend/借(给.) borrow/(向.)借 take/拿走 bring/带来 fetch/ 取回 In the first pair, Chinese resorts to complement and adverbial to denote direction and in the second group, particles are employed. D.Motion + cause or result e.g. The door blew open. /门吹开了。 (motion + cause) She persuaded him to give up smoking. /她说服了他戒烟。 (motion + result) Although there are many other examples of incorporation, it is beyond the intention of this paper to give a detailed discussion on each type. 3.Particles in the verb complex 3.1. When young children are learning their native language they very often hear verb phrases such as 走过来 (come over here),到爸爸那去(go over to Daddy), 伸出舌头 (put out your tongue); or else "pick it up", "put it away", etc. In the above examples, the Chinese “过”, “去”, “出” and English ones, “over”, “up” and “out”, act as particles in directional phrasal verbs. As mentioned in the first part of this paper, not all the motion complexes can be lexicalized as single head verbs. Quite often, particles are used both in English and Chinese to add information like direction, aspect and so on. The combination of a head verb and a particle is called phrasal, which presents the appearance of a two-word or three-word phrase but functions in many respects like a single word. It is probably true that children of English-speaking people learn English phrasal verbs earlier than any other kind of verb, and that foreign learners find them difficult to master. The reason is two-fold. a. A verb complex of this type may have a meaning, which is simply the sum of its parts, but may also have a meaning, which bears little apparent relation to those parts. b. The particle may indicate some kind of direction but may just as easily have a meaning little related to direction in its spatial sense. There are too many phrasal verbs in Modern English (and the number is constantly growing) to be discussed here. Since our topic is the comparison of the linguistic forms of the motion complex, we confine our discussion to the directional phrasal verbs. 3. 2. We divide the directional phrasal verbs into two categories according to literal and figurative meaning. A.Literal (motion + direction) The particles indicate the physical direction of motion or action. e.g.爬上 / climb up take off /脱下来 走过来 / come over B.Figurative (motion + aspect) In its figurative use the particle loses most of its directional meaning, and instead has a certain aspectual function in which it often indicates the starting, continuation or completion of a movement or action. e.g.The music began to hot up. /音乐变得热烈起来。 fight on / 战斗下去 喝完牛奶/ drink the milk up Since this type of directional phrasal verbs present little transparency and thus little comparability, they would not come within the scope of this paper. From the above examples we have seen that English and Chinese directional verbs are not always corresponding. A.Corresponding bring out /带来 tie up /捆起来 win him over /把他争取过来 B.Non-corresponding 提出意见 /bring up a point 活下去 /live on They sent in many valuable suggestions. /他们寄来许多宝贵意见. It is worthy of special note that in Chinese many directional particles can either be used after the head verb to express direction or aspect, or can be used independently, acting as predicate of the sentence. 上来-来这儿! 走进-进门 开过-过桥 跑出去-快出去! 4. How Chinese interference works 4.1.Since English and Chinese verbs are so different in terms of incorporation, how do those differences contribute to the mother tongue interference? First, Chinese interference accounts for some errors made by students. "Borrow" and "lend" are mixed up obviously because the Chinese equivalent "借" does not divulge direction. Misled by the notion that a one-to-one correspondence can be established between English and Chinese, some students may translate "取回" as "fetch back" without realizing that the "direction" element has already been incorporated in the head verb. The same error is committed with expressions like "still remain", "repeat again", "connect together", and so on, which are called tautology. Corder (1981) divided errors into "overt" errors and "covert" ones. Compared with apparent errors like that in person-number agreement, those at the semantic level are covert ones that are not easily detected. However, students' inability to employ some idiomatic English expressions, although cannot be considered as an error, is more covert than errors. Underspecification in writing is such a case in point. Of course, the choice of level of specificity varies from situation to situation. For example, if we were describing our experiences in obtaining a driver's license, it would be appropriate to say, "After having my picture taken, I went upstairs to pay the fee. "The general verb "go" is all that is required if our focus is not on the physical motions but on the process of getting a license. But suppose how "I" went upstairs has much relevance to the main point of our story, we could pack in more information by replacing the general word with more specific ones like "saunter" or "stumble up". The need to refer accurately thus calls for specification in writing. The problem is that specific verbs do not easily come to mind in our writing process. This is because the degree of transparency plays an important part in language acquisition. For instance, we may find words like ball-pen (圆珠笔) that are semantically transparent easy to memorize, whereas many specific verbs, which contain several motion elements and thus are opaque, have less learnability. As a result, Chinese students tend to use general verbs in their writing and when more information is required, their practice is to work out a lot of modifiers (adverbial, complement, and so on) to qualify the general verb. The following sentence is taken from a composition of one of my classmates. "A light shone faintly and unsteadily at the end of the passage. I could hardly see what was going on there." Apparently, "Faintly and unsteadily" are inappropriate to modify "shine". Besides, too many modifiers may sound more like an explanation than a description. Reorganized with a specific verb "glimmer", the sentence could be improved.(Sentences made in such a way could be labeled as "China English".) Another striking evidence of "China English" lies in the use of causative verbs. Referring to causative verbs, we naturally have words like "make", "let", "set", "get", "have" in mind. However, apart from those common causatives, the causative component is incorporated in a lot of specific verbs, especially emotional causatives like "surprise", "delight", "annoy", "upset", "puzzle", "scare", "assure", etc. Making an analysis of the translation work of Chinese students, especially those newcomers to English, we may discover something strange but almost universal. That is, when the causative mood is required in the translation, the word "make" occurs in a shocking frequency as the exact equivalent to the Chinese causative "使". e.g.电视使人们互相交流的机会少了。 (TV is depriving people of the chances to communicate with each other.) TV makes people have fewer chances to communicate with each other. 他使我们相信他的工作能力。 (He convinced us of his ability to work.) He made us trust his ability to work. Following this pattern, students work out translations, grammatically correct, yet marked with apparent Chinese traces. They