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Article published In:
Concentric
Vol. 46:2 (2020) ► pp.173–205

Acquiring the polysemous adverb HAI in Chinese by English-speaking, Japanese-speaking, and Korean-speaking CSL learners

| National Taiwan Normal University
| National Kaohsiung Normal University

Using corpus analysis and error analysis, this study investigates English-speaking, Japanese-speaking, and Korean-speaking Chinese learners’ acquisition of various meanings of hai in Mandarin Chinese, including its temporal meaning ‘still, yet’ as well as its abundant atemporal meanings involving addition, comparison and counter-expectation. We found a preponderance of misselection errors across the three groups of learners. The next most common error type for the Japanese-speaking and Korean-speaking learners was omission, while omission and over-inclusion were equally challenging for the English-speaking learners. Further analysis of errors in misselection shows that many learners failed to distinguish the temporal hai from the atemporal haishi required in a concessive sentence for the counter-expectation meaning.

Keywords: Chinese adverb hai , Chinese as a second language, learner corpus, error analysis, second language acquisition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Various uses of hai
    • 2.1Temporal hai
    • 2.2Additive hai
    • 2.3Comparative hai
    • 2.4Moderate hai
    • 2.5Counter-expectation (CE) hai
    • 2.6Derivations of various uses of hai
  • 3.Data collection and classification
    • 3.1The data
    • 3.2The analytical framework
    • 3.3Identification and categorization of errors
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1The uses of hai in the data of the English-speaking, Japanese-speaking, and Korean-speaking CSL learners
    • 4.2Errors made by the CSL learners
      • 4.2.1Errors made by the English-speaking CSL learners
      • 4.2.2Errors made by the Japanese-speaking CSL learners
      • 4.2.3Errors made by the Korean-speaking CSL learners
    • 4.3Overall discussions
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 28 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/consl.00017.hsi
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