Second Language Acquisition of English Noun Countability
The countability and atomicity of English nouns belong to the categories of morphosyntax and semantics,respectively,and the link between the two involves the morphosyntax-semantics interface.Previous studies related to the second language acquisition of English noun countabili-ty focus on learners from classifier languages like Chinese.Few studies have been conducted with learners from non-classifier languages like Russian,and even fewer have looked at the mor-phosyntax-semantics interface.In order to fill this gap,the present study employs a sentence completion task to examine the acquisition of English noun countability by native speakers of Russian and Chinese at different levels of second language proficiency.It is found that:(1)Chi-nese speakers are less accurate than Russian speakers when using plural marking with mass nouns.Specifically,Chinese speakers are less accurate when using plural marking with mass atomic nouns than with count nouns and mass non-atomic nouns;Russian speakers,on the other hand,do not exhibit significant differences in the accuracy of plural marking across different noun types;(2)the morphosyntax-semantics interface causes different degrees of difficulty for the acquisition of English noun countability;however,this difficulty could be effectively mitigat-ed as second language proficiency increases.This study explains the findings based on the Shal-low Structure Hypothesis and the Interface Hypothesis.
English nounscountabilityatomicitythe morphosyntax-semantics interface
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
