A Research On The Overall Use Of The It-Cleft Construction Among English Learners In Chinese Colleges

The it-cleft sentence is a special expression in English.It is composed of the structure of It be…(relatives)… and other unfixed components.The meaning of such a sentence is jointly conveyed by the matrix clause and the relative clause,and the pragmatic function is to foreground the enhanced theme with the rheme serving as the supplement.The special structure and function of the it-cleft sentence have always been the focus of many scholars,and also a great challenge for EFL learners.Previous studies on the it-cleft sentence pay much attention to the sentence itself from perspectives of structural linguistics,systemic functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics.However,the investigations are rarely found on exploring the different use and causal factors of the it-cleft constructions by English learners in Chinese colleges based on Cognitive Linguistics(hereinafter CL).In view of that,the thesis attempts to explore the overall use of the it-cleft construction by Chinese college English learners from perspectives of syntactic structure,semantics and discourse function.Then,different use of the it-cleft constructions by Chinese college English learners are explained from the views of linguistics and cognition in order to shine new light into the research and teaching of the it-cleft sentence.By virtue of corpus-based research method,the sentences with it-cleft constructions are collected from Chinese Learner English Corpus(hereinafter CLEC),Ten Thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners(hereinafter TECCL),Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(hereinafter SWECCL)and Corpus of Contemporary American English(hereinafter COCA).By classifying,comparing and explaining the data of Chinese college English learners and native speakers,the thesis tries to answer the following three research questions:Question 1: What is the overall use of the it-cleft constructions in Chinese college English learner corpus and native speaker corpus?Question 2: What is the different use of the it-cleft constructions by Chinese college English learners compared with the native speakers?Question 3: What are the main causes leading to the differences?Compared with native speakers,the different use of the it-cleft constructions by Chinese college English learners is as follows: on syntactic structural level,the it-cleft constructions with adverbials get enhanced and nouns as the enhanced theme are overused while those with direct objects get enhanced is underused.On semantic level,more varieties of the meaning of the enhanced theme are expressed,and on discourse functional level,the it-cleft constructions are overused without fully considering contexts.In this study,results can be explained from two views: from a linguistic perspective,the phenomena of first language transfer,over-generalization and over-simplification lead to insufficient language acquisition;from a cognitive perspective,this thesis proposes Itcleft Construction Cognitive Model(hereinafter ICCM)based on Event-domain Cognitive Model(hereinafter ECM)and the figure-ground theory,which indicates that insufficient acquisition of it-cleft constructions by Chinese college English learners stems from inaccurate choices of figure and ground in the cognitive model.