A STUDY ON THE USE OF DIRECTIONAL PREPOSITIONS IN CHINESE BY VIETNAMESE STUDENTS

Abstract

Based on the Vietnamese students’ Chinese Interlanguage Corpus, this article studied the use of the directional prepositions “朝, 往, 向”. Students have a very high rate of correct use of these prepositions, most often use the preposition “向”, followed by the preposition “往”, and finally the preposition “朝”. Students only use the preposition “朝” in conjunction with the verb “看”, often combine the preposition “往” with nouns/ noun phrases of location, and combine the preposition “向” with nouns/ noun phrases representing a person or thing. Errors don’t occur when using the preposition “朝”; errors appear with the preposition “往” due to the wrong combination of the object or due to the combination with “着”; errors occur with the preposition “向” due to confusion with other prepositions, the overuse of the preposition “向” or the lack of verbs. The reasons for the errors are negative transfer and overgeneralization of target language rules. According to the research results, this article puts forward some teaching suggestions.