A Study on the Effects of Subjective and Objective Specificity on Chinese EFL Learners' Output of English Articles

Specificity, which is related to nominals, can be defined in two dimensions: the scopal relations and the cognition of the subjective world, which are called objective specificity and subjective specificity, respectively, in this paper.However, there is still room for discussion on the effects of these two types of specificity on the acquisition of English articles by Chinese learners.This study employs the elicited production method to investigate the article usage of 120 Chinese students in five referential types of DPs.The results show that there is no significant difference between the effects of objective and subjective specificity on the article output of two definite types.For the indefinite types, there is no significant difference in the performance of articles between the subjective specific and the objective specific nominals, while there is a significant difference in the accuracy of articles between the indefinite nonspecific and the indefinite subjective/objective specific types.The results indicate that objective specificity significantly affects the output of English articles by Chinese students rather than subjective specificity.