ABSTRACT

Previous studies have shown that dependency distance and its probability distribution can be applied as syntactic indicators of English as interlanguage. However, the universal application of these indicators has not been verified from the perspective of language typology. The issues are addressed in the present study based on a treebank of Chinese interlanguage of English and Japanese native speakers. The findings are as follows: (1) with the improvement of L2 proficiency, the MDDs of learners with different native language backgrounds gradually approach that of the target language in different patterns, and dependency distance is of universal significance as a metric to measure the development of interlanguage’s syntactic complexity; (2) Chinese interlanguage also follows the principle of least effort, and its probability distribution of dependency distance, like those of natural languages, presents a power–law distribution, which can successfully fit the Zipf-Alekseev distribution; (3) the right truncated modified Zipf-Alekseev distribution can be used to measure Chinese interlanguage proficiency, and the fitting parameters of the probability distribution of dependency distance as a metric of interlanguage proficiency are also of universal value.

摘要

以往的研究表明，依存距离及其概率分布可以作为英语作为中介语的句法指标。然而，这些指标的普遍适用性并没有从语言类型学的角度得到验证。本研究基于以英语和日语为母语的汉语中间语树库来解决这些问题。研究结果如下：（1）随着二语水平的提高，不同母语背景的学习者的MDDs以不同的模式逐渐接近目标语言，依赖距离作为衡量发展程度的指标具有普遍意义中介语的句法复杂性；（2）汉语中介语也遵循最省力的原则，其依赖距离的概率分布与自然语言一样，呈现幂律分布，可以成功拟合 Zipf-Alekseev 分布；(3)右截断修正Zipf-Alekseev分布可用于衡量汉语中介语能力，依赖距离概率分布作为中介语能力度量的拟合参数也具有普遍价值。