EXPERIENCE CLASSIFICATION AND LINGUISTIC DISTRIBUTION

Every speech community has its own language. Each language is capable of expressing the overt life experience of its speech community. Two speech communities can have s imi l a r meaning experiences, and their languages can have s imi l a r l inguistic categories. Similar meaning experiences, however, can have different experience classification. And difference in ex perience classification can thus r e su l t in different distribution in s imi l a r linguistic categories. In foreign language learning, differences between languages are always learning difficulties. Language teachers , however, d a r e not relax in the blissful belief that s imi l a r i t i e s between languages pose no teaching problems. The re can be s imi l a r phonemes between languages. But t he re can a l so be different allophones and different arrangements of phonemes;2 hence “similarff phonemes a l s o pose teaching problems. In this artic l e we shal l see that one s imilar i ty in meaning, one s imilar i ty in g rammar , and one s imilar i ty in meaning and g r a m m a r may be teaching problems too, due to differences in distribution. The languages are American English and Mandarin Chinese.