Variability in the use of the English article system by Chinese learners of English

Abstract

It is well known that the Chinese language does not have functional equivalents of the English definite and indefinite article. Correspondingly, there is plenty of observational evidence that Chinese learners have difficulty with the article system in English. In particular, these learners have a marked tendency to omit the article where native speakers of English would use one. In this article we report the results of an experimental investigation of the variable use of the definite and indefinite articles by 18 Chinese learners of English. A referential communication task was used to elicit samples of the speech of these learners which was rich in referring noun phrases. From the resulting corpus 1884 noun phrases were coded, using a taxonomy based on Hawkins' (1978) description of the definite and indefinite articles and demonstratives in English. The analysis shows an overall rate of 78% suppliance of articles in contexts where a native speaker would use the definite or indefinite article. Of the remaining 22% of contexts where articles are not used, we found that many of the instances of nonsuppliance of articles could be explained by three principles:

1) a syntactic principle of ‘determiner drop’, whereby an NP with definite or indefinite reference need not be overtly marked for [± definiteness] if it is included in the scope of the determiner of a preceding NP;

2) a ‘recoverability’ principle, whereby an NP need not be marked for [± definiteness] if the information encoded in this feature is recoverable from the context; and

3) a ‘lexical transfer principle’, whereby some of these learners are using demonstratives (particularly this) and the numeral one as markers of definiteness and indefiniteness respectively.

However, these principles do not account for all the instances of non-native-like usage in the corpus. There remains a residue of 206 noun phrases without articles in contexts where native speakers would use an article.There are identical contexts, moreover, where these learners use the articles. We suggest that this evidence of unsystematic variation in the use of the articles by these learners lends support to the hypothesis that the optionality in the use of articles is due to difficulty acquiring the correct mapping from the surface features of definiteness and referentiality (the, a, and the zero article Ø) onto the abstract features of the DP.