Abstract

This study investigates the learning situation of senior high school students in mainland China about acquisition of transferred negation of English sentence structure. Through translation test and questionnaire investigation, a survey is made about this language learning phenomenon among 173 students. From the study it is found that students mainly have problems with the typical kind of transferred negation sentences, the negation caused by the predicative in the matrix clause, the negation of because-clause, the negation of infinitive structure or the objective complements and so on. The language foundation of English has no direct relation to whether students are familiar with transferred negation structure. There exists a very clear difference between students from different schools for some sentences and students from the same class tend to make mistakes in the same kind of transferred negation sentences. Female students have an advantage over male students in the translation test. Some factors like the habits of Chinese expression have great effects on students’ understanding of the structure.

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