The Researches abroad is comparatively richer than researches at home. Peter Thomas Geach, a famous British philosopher and professor of logic at the University of Leeds, had introduced the terms “logically attributive adjective’ and ‘logically predicative adjective” (Geach P T, 1956). John Donnelly also mentions Geach’s theory that he had introduced the terms “logically attributive adjective’ and ‘logically predicative adjective” as follows: I shall say that in a phrase ‘an A B’ (‘A’ being an adjective and ‘B’ being a noun) ‘A’ is a (logically) predicative adjective if the predication ‘is an A B’ splits up logically into a pair of predications ‘is a B’ and ‘is A’; otherwise I shall say that ‘A’ is a (logically) attributive adjective (John Donnelly, 1971). Grammarian like Quirk gave the name “a-adjective” to a special branch of predicative adjectives. They are experts in the field of “a-adjective” but did not explore the use among English learners. Boyd J K and Goldberg A E had discussed about a-adjectives in their thesis: Learning What NOT to Say: The Role of Statistical Preemption and Categorization in A-Adjective Production (Boyd J K, Goldberg A E, 2011). And this thesis will be the main material I use as reference. They emphasize that there is a class of adjectives beginning with a syllabic schwa (written as a-) that resist appearing prenominally in attributive position such as afraid, afloat, alive and so on. They design three experiments. Experiment 1 aims to investigate that whether learners avoid using frequently-used a-adjectives as attributive adjectives. If they did so, will they do the same action to the novel a-adjectives? The experimental results show that learners do use familiar a-adjectives in relative clauses while they are not sure that if the novel a-adjectives can be used the same way as those familiar a-adjectives because there are many adjectives begin with “a” such as adult, astute and acute that are not a-adjectives. They design altogether 3 experiments and I concentrate on the first one which I have introduced.

Based on the former research we can find that learners can use familiar a-adjective behind noun while still make hesitation of the use of novel a-adjectives. Therefore, this thesis is going to investigate the Chinese EFL learners’ use of attributive adjective and predicative adjective. And the thesis will also mention about the use of a-adjectives. English is different from Chinese in which adjectives can be used both as attributive adjectives or predicative adjectives. However, in English some adjectives can be used only as one of the two ways. Some adjectives that can be used only as predicative adjectives are usually begin with ‘a’, called ‘a-adjective’. But not all adjectives begin with “a” can be called “a-adjective”Therefore, how would students use this kind of adjectives? Will they use them optionally or watchfully? If there was an example of the adjective’s use, can students infer the correct use?