A Corpus-based Study On The Phenomenon Of Redundant BE For Chinese English Learners

The verb BE is one of the most striking grammar items during the acquisitionprocess of the second language. Some common features can be found concerningerrors of verb BE variants, and it takes a long time for learners to acquire the use ofverb BE. Redundancy and omission of BE are two main variations which can bealways referred to in literatures. Studies on omission of verb BE are comparativelymore than redundancy. In the literatures of Chinese-English inter-language, studieson redundancy of BE appears less, but indicate more difficult problems. So far, Yang&Huang (2002), the only two researchers, are devoted to the phenomena. Yetredundancy is as important and complex as omission of BE as well. Meanwhile,former studies have been rarely based on corpus which cannot producecomprehensive data to analyze the use of BE. In this paper, corpus-based approach isapplied to analyze redundancy of BE.The following questions guide the whole study:(1) How do the redundancyof BE distribute?(2) What kinds of redundancy errors concerning the verb BE aremost striking in foreign language learning settings?(3) Is there any connectionbetween redundancy of BE and finiteness of BE?This paper found that the frequency of redundant BE in CLEC is associatedwith the forms and types of main verbs after BE.(1) When the verb appeared to bethe activity verb (transitive/unergative verb), redundant BE showed more frequentlybefore the root forms of these verbs than before the inflectional forms.(2) Whenverbs occurred to be ergative ones, redundancy of BE appeared much often beforethe passive forms than before the root forms of these verbs.(3) On the analysis ofredundant BE before transitive verb, two kinds of rare sentences of “pseudo-passive”have been found, which both have the structure of “BE+Vt-ed/en+NP”.(4) Basedon the qualitative analysis of redundant BE, this paper demonstrates that underdifferent contexts, redundant BE always has various functions, like negative and interrogative auxiliary, progressive and passive auxiliary, stressing marker as well astense marker.(5) From St2to St4, compared with redundant infinite BE, theproportion of redundant finite BE appears a downward trend, which suggests thatlearners may gradually decrease the usage of finite BE to conduct the tense of asentence. However, the total frequency of redundant BE present no sign ofdownward. Verb BE may have another more specific functions like serving aspassive marker of ergative verb.