A Contrastive Corpus-Based Study Of Parentheses In Donghua College Students' Writings

Parentheses play an important role in the discourse as cohesive ties. However, a number of studies have shown that language learners, especially foreign language learners, tend to overuse, underuse or misuse parentheses in their writings. This thesis employs a corpus-based approach and carries out a comprehensive contrastive interlanguage analysis of Donghua University English majors' use of parentheses in their argumentative writings with native speakers. Through the comparative studies, the differences and similarities of the use of parentheses have been explored. This thesis is based on three corpora, DHCEW, LOCNESS and WECCL. The author firstly intends to find out the highly-frequent contrastive, summative and additive parentheses in DHCEW, used by English majors of Donghua University; and secondly the author tries to find out these parentheses' frequencies in LOCNESS; and thirdly the author manages to explore the differences among corpora DHCEW, LOCNESS and WECCL. As regards the features of the frequencies in DHCEW, the author analyzes the differences among the frequencies in DHCEW, LOCNESS and in WECCL. Then this thesis analyzes the pragmatic features of high frequency contrastive, summative and additive parentheses used by Donghua English majors. Finally the error analysis will be done accordingly.This thesis conducts a comparative study on the features of contrastive, summative and additive parentheses by quantitative analysis based on corpora, and qualitative analysis based on pragmatic perspectives. This study also tries to find out what errors Donghua English majors often have made when they use the high-frequency contrastive, summative and additive parentheses. The findings of this thesis may shed light on the English teaching and learning, most specifically, helping students to study contrastive, summative and additive parentheses well.