Analysis Of Error Characteristics On Subject-verb Concord Of Chinese Non-English Major Students

This paper is devoted to investigating the errors on subject-verb concord of Chinese non-English major students. Subject-verb concord plays a very important role in probing the proper use of predicate verb. Domestic researchers have done lots of work on this grammatical item, however, most of the studies focus on the description and summary instead of study based on corpus.The corpora selected in this paper are sub-corpora (St3 and St4) from CLEC, Chinese Learner English Corpus, and the subject-verb errors are counted by using the FoxPro program and data collected are analyzed by using SPSS.It is found that there is not a distinctive difference in quantity of the subject-verb errors between the two sub-corpora (St3 and St4). Due to the features of mother tongue and complexity of target language rules, students tend to use the original form of verbs and singular form of be without paying attention to the verb inflections and make less error when subject is Pronoun rather than Noun. Besides, there is a sinusoid distribution between the amount of the error and the distance of the misused subject and verb.This paper, by classifying, counting and analyzing the subject-verb errors, aims at discovering learners' difficulties and error characteristics in their language learning. It can also provide implications on language teaching to improve the learners' competence of writing and comprehensive linguistic competence.