Discoursal Error Inquiry Into The English Dissertations Of The Postgraduates Majoring In Linguistics And Applied Linguistics

Second language acquisition (SLA) is a complex process, during which learners produce a large number of errors. The study of errors has been carried out by many scholars at home and abroad (Bhatia, 1974; Dulay, and Burt.1974; Zhu Meiping, 1990; Liu Shaolong, 1999, etc.). They believed that most errors that learners make should not be corrected because they are developmental ones, which have aroused great attention and have been explored by many researchers. However, their research focuses chiefly on data collected from elementary and intermediate learners, and at the word level and the sentence level. The discoursal errors made by the advanced learners have seldom been mentioned. This dissertation aims to scrutinize the discoursal errors in the 50 sampled dissertations made by the postgraduates majoring in linguistics and applied linguistics in two universities.The 50 sampled dissertations may be divided according to different categories, such as university, year of issuing and branches of learning. 138 errors are selected from the 50 dissertations. Among them 71 errors have been found at the discourse level which take 51.4% of the whole. By quantitative and qualitative analysis, the 71 discoursal errors are further divided into five categories by the author with statistical percentage and number which have also been utilized in this dissertation. The five categories are identified as: discoursal errors in category-mixture, discoursal errors in inconsistency, discoursal errors in ambiguity, discoursal errors in overgeneralization, and discoursal errors in subject-shifting. Discoursal errors in category-mixture refer to some words, sentences or ways of expression belonging to different categories, but mixed together within one discourse, though they are grammatically correct; discoursal errors in inconsistency usually refer to the discourses in which the former parts of the discourses cannot accord, or contradict with their latter parts; discoursal errors in ambiguity refer to those semantically confused errors which exist in the discourse, and can only be interpreted through the analysis of the whole discourse; discoursal errors in overgeneralization refer to such a kind of phenomenon that the author claims to do at the beginning of one discourse, but he/she overgeneralizes what he/she does at the end of the same discourse and there is no corresponded relation between them; discoursal errors in subject-shifting refer to the subject of the author's research which shifts from the original one to another, or from an individual to the group in the discourse development. Detailed description and explanation about each of the five categories with examples are presented in the main body of the dissertation.The major findings in this dissertation may be summarized as the following:First of all, as the advanced learners, postgraduates commit a few errors at the word level or sentence level, but tend to make more errors at the discourse level and the data collected from the dissertations proves that there do exist a lot of discoursal errors in the postgraduates' dissertations.Secondly, many discoursal errors made by the postgraduates, such as the discoursal errors in category-mixture, are grammatically correct. They become erroneous only in the context of the larger linguistic unit (discourse) in which they occurred. Thirdly, the continuity of the whole discourse is destroyed by the discoursal errors in inconsistency, which occupies the highest percentage among the five categories. The current research is only an attempt to find out the discoursal errors and their classification from which some findings may be drawn. What I hope with a great expectation is that my research and findings can arouse the postgraduates' attention, consideration and logical thinking in coping with their dissertations as a whole.