S-genitive And Of-genitive In Written English: A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Between Native Speakers And Chinese English Majors

This study with corpus-based approach is conducted to explore Chinese English majors'utilization of s-genitive and of-genitive in writing from perspectives of register, lexical factor and semantic factor through Contrastive Inter-language Analysis, aiming at revealing the differences and/or similarities of s-genitive and of-genitive utilized by native speakers and Chinese English majors. The two corpora for comparison used in the present study are ST6 the sub-corpus in CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) and LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays).Data were collected and processed with Foxpro Programs and SPSS was also used to carry out several necessary statistical tests. It is concluded that there are differences as well as similarities of the utilization of s-genitive and of-genitive in writing between native speakers and Chinese English majors.1) From the perspective of register, the similarities in both corpora are that s-genitives are far more outnumbered by of-genitives and s-genitives in singular form are outnumbered by s-genitives in plural form. The differences are that s-genitives are overused and of-genitives are underused by the Chinese English majors compared with native college students, which reveals that Chinese English majors have little awareness of register in their mind.2) From the perspective of the type of N1, the similarities in both corpora are that s-genitive is more common with personal nouns and personal names, of-genitive is favored by inanimate nouns and collective nouns occur more frequently in of-genitive than in s-genitive. The differences are that personal names are underused and personal nouns are overused by Chinese English majors compared with native college students.3) From the perspective of semantic relation between N1 and N2, the similarities in both corpora are that s-genitives are used more frequently to realize possessive relation and subjective relation and of-genitives are used more frequently to realize possessive relation and objective relation. The differences are that s-genitives in LOCNESS also have a relatively high proportion with origin relation and descriptive relation; while in ST6 in s-genitives, genitives of origin and descriptive genitives are underused and possessive genitives and objective genitives are overused. As to of-genitives in ST6, subjective genitives are overused and objective genitives are underused compared the results obtained from LOCNESS.This paper tends to provide significant implications for the future grammar teaching and learning on genitives especially grammar textbook compilation on genitives in China.