A study on the acquisition of Chinese reciprocal adverbs by Vietnamese students

Abstract

“互, 相, 互相, 相互” are Chinese reciprocal adverbs, their syntactic functions are the same, but there are some differences between them. Based on the Vietnamese students’ Chinese interlanguage corpus, this paper analyzes the acquisition of this group of adverbs by Vietnamese students. The results show that Vietnamese students often use the adverb “互相”, sometimes use the adverb “相互”, do not use the adverb “互”, and the adverb “相” is often used in the phrases “相V” is in the process of lexicalization. In the process of acquiring the adverb “互相”, students made the following four usage errors: (1) wrong order, (2) collocation with bare monosyllabic verb, (3) collocation with noun, (4) confusion with adverb “一起”. The reason for the errors is the negative transfer of the native language and the over-generalization of the grammatical rules of the target language.