A Corpus-based Study On Acquisition Of English Prepositions

As a new research approach in applied linguistics, corpus-based approach has been widely employed in language studies. The emergence of enormous text corpus, and well-designed concordance system has made the corpus-based analysis more friendly and convenient for researchers. With a corpus-based analysis and error analysis method, the present study explores the status quo of second language learners’ability of using prepositions from three aspects. Firstly, the researcher has quantitatively investigated the frequency of15most used prepositions in ST6(CLEC) and overseas students work collection, and LOCNESS corpus as the reference corpus. Secondly, the researcher has investigated learners’the acquisition on prepositional collocations. Because of the large quantity of prepositions and limited research time, the author selected preposition of, in, with, for as the collocational study subjects. The author has discussed the prepositional collocations n on the basis of their absolute D-Values. The third part of the study is error analysis on the most frequent errors committed by Chinese students-in, on, at. The author concludes that first language interference, overgeneralization, and ignorance of rule restrictions are the main factors, which affect language learners’ prepositions acquisition. This research indicates that comparing with native speakers, Chinese students have underused some prepositions and Chinese students need a lot of improvement on their collocational competence. In this study, through comparing the data from home students and Chinese overseas students, the language environment would affect learners’ language acquisition. The ESL learners can use English better than EFL learners because the former has a natural language environment than the latter.