Abstract
AbstractAlthough the acquisition of English grammatical morphology among Chinese learners has been widely studied, limited attention is attached to the difficulties in acquiring English plural morphology, and its complexity is underestimated. This study explores in cognitive terms what makes English plural morphology difficult for Chinese learners. Data of English plural marking errors made by Chinese learners were collected from the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and analysed from four perspectives: lexical referent types, lexical countability, grammatical number agreement and contextual function. The results show that Chinese learners’ consistent failure to supply plural marking to nouns in obligatory contexts is not a random performance but a systematic behaviour. The underlying cause for the residual difficulties in the acquisition of English plural morphology is related to the cross-linguistic differences in the conceptualisation of number.KeywordsNumberPlural morphology(Non)referentialityCollectivity
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