| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立新竹教育大學 === 中國語文學系碩士班 === 105 === Chinese has various and complex conjunction phrases. The complexity of Chinese conjunction phrases make it difficult for Chinese learners to correctly apply in sentences and often make errors (Lee, 2001) Because of the difficulties of using Chinese conjunction phrases, significant amount of research focus on teaching methods of conjunction phrases. In this study, we focused on 2 specific conjunctions, "Rúguǒ" and "Yàoshi", which are usually used in making complex hypothetical sentences, i.e. similar to English "if " conditional sentences. Based on previous research, these two conjunction phrases are the most frequently used hypothesis markers. Moreover, these two hypothesis markers are marked as beginner level in Chinese 8000 Vocabulary. Accordingly, we focused our study on "Rúguǒ" and "Yàoshi" in this study.
Analyzed data was drawn from Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese (Sinica Corpus) and Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU (CCL). Using "Rúguǒ" as a searching keyword results in 9064 records from database of Sinica Corpus, and 165328 records from database of CCL. Then, first 1000 data with complete semantics were chosen from both data groups. While using "Yàoshi" as a searching keyword from database of Sinica Corpus, 467 results were shown. Only 300 results were used after eliminating those with unclear and incomplete semantics. Again, keyword "Yàoshi" is used to search from database of CCL, and 832 records were chose from 49742 results found from database of CCL.
Our analyzed results meet the Principle of Economy; that is, when 1st sentence and 2nd sentence have the same subject/topic, linking phrases and subject/topic of 2nd sentence were always omitted. When subject/topic of 1st and 2nd sentences are different, only linking phrases can be omitted. In addition, most recent research only analyzed hypothetical complex sentences grammatically, not based on discourse analysis. Therefore, we further made discourse analysis of literature works of Wu Nien-jen (吳念真). We found out when subject/topic of 1st sentence appeared before hypothesis markers, it mostly provided old information. When subject/topic of 1st sentence appeared after hypothesis markers, it can provide either old or new information. In addition, the sentence leaded by hypothetical markers serves as background, and the resulting sentence is foreground. Moreover, we did further analysis using records from Chinese Learner Corpora, from the point of view of TCSL. We found out Chinese language learners made 2 frequent mix-up errors while using hypothetical markers to make complex if sentences: 1) omitting the necessary linking phrases and 2) omitting subject/topic from 2nd sentence.
In order to better facilitate TCSL students learning the usages of "Rúguǒ" and "Yàoshi", teaching methods of these two hypothetical markers were suggested based on our analysis. First, "Rúguǒ" should be taught before "Yàoshi". Secondly, suggested teaching order for the complete usage of complex hypothetical sentences will be: “hypothetical markers (only)”, then “hypothetical markers….., linking phrases”, followed by “hypothetical markers….. dehuà, …….”, and finally “hypothetical markers….. dehuà, linking phrases”.
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