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The researches based on the second language acquisition (SLA) show that language transfer is a very common phenomenon. According to language transfer theory, the habits of native language will have a dramatic impact on second language acquisition, that is to say, the similarities and differences between languages can influence acquisition in the field of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. As a result, it actively promotes (positive transfer) or negatively interferes (negative migration) the SLA. Undoubtedly, “in” is the most frequently used preposition which is an essential part of words in sentences. It can be typical to analyze the misuse phenomenon of “in” during the preposition learning because of language transfer as it could possibly reflect a complete language transfer impact on the second language acquisition.
The article is aiming to inspire the SLA process to make full use of positive transfer and reduce the negative transfer.
2 Literature Review
It is well known that although the overall number of preposition is very small among the parts of speech in English, preposition is still recognized as one of the hardest parts of speech while learning because of their flexible usages. On the one hand, prepositions are active functional words which connect and then constitute concepts of location, time, relationships, actions, causes and etc. On the other hand, prepositions are used frequently. According to statistics, there is one preposition in every eight English text words. Brown Corpus (established by The Brown University) statistics show that preposition accounts for 15 words in the top 100 most commonly used English words, and nouns and verbs account for only 8 and 13 respectively. Ranking second only to the preposition “of”, preposition “in” was used most frequently among all the English prepositions. Thus, study on the misuse of preposition “in” during acquisition is of great importance in the second language acquisition research.
In study composed by Sun Lili and Yang Xuejing (2008: 107-108), preposition error phenomenon was mostly affected by native language that misused transitive as intransitive, or by the relevant structures. The cause can be complex that it may result from the effects of Chinese meaning or just being unclear about the match relationship. Overall, the study found that most students make mistakes in four aspects: ignorance of the rules, random omission, simplification of the rules, mother tongue interference. In addition, there are several errors due to the transition generalization, intentionally add and wrong assumption existing. However, the data are not adequate and the conclusion is very vague which requires a further study.
Based on researches done by Ma Dongmei and Shang Yan (2011: 118-119), following findings can be generated: 1) Chinese learners overuse “in”, particularly those with the core meaning, those with the simple metaphorical meaning and those in set phrases and idioms; 2) Compared with native speakers, Chinese students underuse those with more extended metaphorical meanings; the in-phrases and in-idioms used are significantly less varied than those used by the native students; 3) the error rate of Chinese EFL students is not high except when the learners use “in” to express more extended metaphorical meaning. As the learners' English proficiency improved, the error rate gets obviously lower.
According to dissertation written by Zuo Shangjun (2009: 174-175), metaphorical usage of prepositions is widespread. They were originally used as text meanings to represent spatial relationships, and then metaphors for the time, and then gradually extended to many other relationships. This creates troubles for Chinese students in preposition use.
An assumption has been made that in the acquisition of preposition “in”, it should be relatively easy for Chinese learners to understand in term of literal sense. But the challenge lies in its metaphorical usage. Metaphorical usage involves the differences between cognitive way of thinking, culture, as well as changes of preposition over time. Chinese learners are accustomed to determine the use of English prepositions with the Chinese habit of thinking, which will inevitably lead to the misuse.