earticle

영어

This paper aims to investigate whether Chinese speakers are able to distinguish between NP-level genericity and sentence-level genericity in English, and whether proficiency and L1 grammatical features have influences on their interpretation of English generic references. For this study, 155 L1-Chinese L2-English learners and 48 native English speakers participated in an acceptable judgment task to evaluate their understanding of the generic NPs. Our findings suggest that Chinese learners are sensitive to the distinctions between NP-level genericity and sentence-level genericity. In addition, this paper found the influences of L1 transfer, such as the availability of bare singulars and the [+definite] feature of the Chinese plural marker -men, but it was also shown that it is possible for learners to overcome these effects. Generally, with the development of proficiency, the Chinese learners became more target-like in their interpretational patterns of English nominals, especially in sentence-level genericity constructions.