The Acquisition Of The Chinese Directional Complement By Italian-Speaking Learners: An Acquisition Error Analysis

Abstract

The following study focuses on the problems of acquisition of the Chinese directional complement by Italian-speaking learners. The theoretical analysis of literatures about directional complement will be complemented by an experimental approach. Through a questionnaire consisting of different tasks, the competence of Italian students in using Chinese directional complements will be analysed. The aim is to identify the students' greatest difficulties and to understand the causes. The thesis is divided into three sections. The first section, consisting of the first chapter, is dedicated to a review of the literature on the verb-framed and satellite-frame language types proposed by Leonard Talmy (1985, 1991). Then we will introduce the Chinese directional complement using definitions from different grammars (Abbiati 1998, Li and Thompson 1989, Liu Yuehua 1998, Yip Po-Ching 2003, Teng Wen-Hua 2011, Ross and Ma 2014). In the second section, we will present the structure of the Chinese Directional Complement, the diachronic development, and its contemporary use. We will focus on the study of the acquisition of Chinese directional complements, through the analysis of the research conducted also on Italian-speaking students by Chiara Romagnoli and Eleonora Luzi (2012). The last section, chapters 3 and 4, is dedicated to the presentation of the questionnaire, research questions and tasks structure. The results obtained from the tasks provided to the students through the Google Form format will be discussed in the last section of the thesis, where, in the light of a previous discussion on the results of the tasks, we will try to enrich the debate with some suggestions to improve the acquisition of the directional complement by Italian-speaking students.