Research Of Lexical Substitution In English Majors' Argumentative Writing From The Perspective Of Paradigmatic Relations

Studies show that the primary problems existing currently in Chinese students' English writing are monotonous wording and poor substitution, which greatly affect students'writing quality. To settle problems above, Chinese English teaching experts have come up with many positive and effective teaching strategies, but few of them were concerned with the methodology for improving the teaching of English writing based on paradigmatic relation. Appropriate substitution on the basis of paradigmatic relation enables the writing to avoid dull repetition. Moreover, it helps students to master words faster and enlarge their vocabulary. This study founded on paradigmatic relation explores the developmental trend of lexical substitution and errors during the lexical substitution in argumentative writing written by English majors in grades one to four. It intends to seek for more effective teaching methods for English writing, enhancing students'proficiency of English writing.According to sense relations in paradigmatic relation, 80 compositions (20 in each grade) written by English majors from SWECCL (2.0 version) are chosen and then qualitative and quantitative studies of them are made. Chiefly speaking, making synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy as the patterns of lexical substitution, this thesis carried out the analysis of distribution and changes of three kinds of sense relations in grades one to four via the software SPSS, and then a qualitative study of substitution errors of synonyms, antonyms and hyponyms are made. The findings show that there are significant differences in the three kinds of substitution patterns employed by English majors in grades one to four. Specifically, (1) In allusion to significance of difference, there exist differences in the three kinds of substitution patterns,and significant differences exist between substitution of synonyms and substitution of antonyms; (2) In respect of substitution frequency, substitution frequency of three sense relations rise with the increase of the grade levels. Of the three substitution patterns, students are inclined to use substitution of synonyms, which shows that synonymous substitution plays a significant role in students'English writing. (3) In terms of substitution errors, there is no significant change of substitution errors of antonym across the four grade levels. On the contrary, substitution errors of synonym and hyponym gradually increase across the four grade levels. The highest error probability goes to synonymous substitution. Vagueness of superordinates leads to a great number of substitution errors of hyponyms and the main reasons for substitution errors of synonyms lie in ignoring collocation and paying no attention to semantic collocation.The paper explores the developmental trend of the use of sense relations across four grade levels. It suggests that teachers and students should attach much importance to lexical substitution. Especially for the correct use of synonyms, the results of the quantitative study of synonymous substitution shows that the frequencies of synonymous substitution go up with the increase of grade levels, but substitution errors are also increasing. For teachers, it is imperative to classify and summarize relative words in the teaching of college English writing, and arouse students' desire for lexical substitution prior to English writing. For students, in the process of English vocabulary acquisition, more attentions should be paid to the relationships between words and get to know which semantic field they belong to; only in this way can the proficiency of lexical substitution be improved.