Copular Usage under Cross Linguistic Influence

According to Lado（1957：2） in the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis, a student who comes into contact with a foreign language will find some features of it quite easy and others extremely difficult. Those elements that are similar to his native language will be simple for .him and those elements that are different will he difficult. Corder （1981： 101）added that where the mother tongue is formally similar to the target language, a learner will pass more rapidly along the developmental continuum （or some parts of it）than where it differs. Eric Kellerman（1986） also believed that learners have intuitions about which language features they can transfer from their first language to the target language and which are less likely to be transferable. And Lee（1968）even held that the interference coming from the learner＇s native language to be the sole cause of difficulty and error in foreign language learning. Given that the Chinese character sbi functions the same as an English copula, 1 would like to apply two theories to illustrate the syntactic features associated with copular usages in this dissertation.     

Justification of Chinese Shi as a Copula ＆ English Copular Sentences under Cross Linguistic Influence

Second language acquisition is a broad topic.Therefore,I narrow it into those of cross linguistic influence.I choose copular usage for my focus of study because both Mandarin Chinese and English share this grammatical morpheme.To what extent do Copulas behave similarly between languages？ This facilitates positive transfer of the first language（L1） features into the second language（L2） as Eric Kellerman（1986） observed that learners have intuitions about which language features they can transfer from their first language to the target language and which are less likely to be transferable.He further proposed that learners have a sense of what features in their L1 are in some way basic.They are more prepared to risk transferring such features than they are those they perceive to be unique to their own language.The copula is a very basic grammatical morpheme as it carries most conjugated forms.Therefore,in this dissertation,I am going to examine how Chinese Shi functions as an English copula and how it influences copular sentences in English writing.