Abstract：The use of attributive adjective and predicative adjective is very often in our daily life and it is also very important in Chinese English learners’ study. Grammarian Quirk gave the name “a-adjective” to a special branch of predicative adjectives whose first letter is “a”. “a-adjective” plays an important role in adjectives. This thesis is going to investigate how Chinese students in universities use attributive adjectives and predicative adjectives through 2 experiments. And the thesis gives the hypothesis that Chinese English learners have no clear notions about attributive adjective and predicative adjective. Through the survey the hypothesis is proved and 3 main problems are showed. Most junior students in university have difficulty in using predicative adjectives, both junior students and senior students are lack of the ability of migration capacity since they have no idea about new adjectives when they meet a-adjectives and they prefer to use attributive syntactic than predicative syntactic. Aiming at the 3 problems, this thesis gives the reasons, and some solutions are proposed.
Key words: attributive adjective; predicative adjective; a-adjective; distinguish; migration
中国英语学习者对定语形容词与表语形容词的使用
摘 要：定语形容词和表语形容词的使用在我们的日常生活中非常频繁而且在中国英语学习者的英语学习中起到了很大的作用。语法学家奎克将其中一种特殊的以字母A开头的表语形容词命名为A形容词，而A形容词在形容词中扮演着重要的角色。本文通过两个实验对中国大学生如何使用表语形容词和定语形容词展开了调查研究。实验假设中国英语学习者并无定语形容词和表语形容词的清晰概念，而这个假设最终被实验证明。实验结果表现出了三个潜在问题：多数低年级大学生不会使用表语形容词；对于A形容词不论高还是低年级的学生都缺乏迁移能力，在遇到新的类似词汇时并不能准确使用；学生们倾向于使用定语句法多于表语句法。针对这三个问题，本文在文末给出了一些合理原因以及应对方法。
关键词：定语形容词; 表语形容词; A形容词; 区分; 迁移
Contents
1. Introduction 1
1.1 Research Background 1
1.2 Research Purpose and Significance 2
1.3 Literature Review 2
2. The Notions of Attributive Adjective and Predicative Adjective 4
3. The Study of English Learners’ Use of Attributive Adjective and Predicative Adjective 7
3.1 Research Process 7
3.1.1 Research Questions 7
3.1.2 Hypothesis 7
3.1.3 Experiment Design 7
3.1.4 Practice 9
3.2 Result 10
3.3 Analysis of Results 11
3.3.1 Data Analysis 11
3.3.2 Reason Analysis 11
3.4 Problem Solving Suggestions 12
4. Conclusion 13
4.1 Overall View 13
4.2 Limitations 13
References 14
1. Introduction
1.1 Research Background
In Chinese students’ English learning, adjective plays an important role. In linguistics, an adjective is a describing word, the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or a noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified. Adjective is one of parts of speech in English, although historically they were classed together with nouns. Also certain words were traditionally considered to be adjectives, including the, this, my, etc. They are now usually classed separately, as determiners. 中国英语学习者对定语形容词与表语形容词的使用:http://www.chuibin.com/yingyu/lunwen_205931.html