A Semantic Inquiry Into Incomprehensible Expression In Interlanguage Of College Non-English Majors

Incomprehensible expression, as a segment of interlanguage, is one of common problems in the process of Chinese students'construction of their English compositions. Generally speaking, the gap between students'lower English level and the higher task assignment is the key to the occurrence of the incomprehensible expressions, which suggest a particular difficulty in students'construction of their intended meanings. However, most researchers have greatly ignored the inquiry into this domain.In this dissertation, the author first reviewed relevant theories, probing the significance of interlanguage theory and the recent studies in and out of China. Then, after research on more than a hundred of sample compositions selected randomly among college non-English majors from an independent school in Jilin province, it was found that traditional approaches were not able to explain all errors in the interlanguage of students such as incomprehensible expressions. Therefore, this dissertation makes an effort to explore a new way to handle the erroneous expression from a semantic viewpoint after a thorough study on the characteristics and frequency of the errors in the compositions.Firstly, five semantic criteria of error classification have been proposed according to whether the meaning can be figured out, whether the meaning is acceptable, whether the meaning is ambiguous, whether the meaning is appropriate, and whether the meaning is well-formed. In accordance with the first criterion, the incomprehensible expressions, which take up 1.03% to the whole errors inquired, have been separated from the interlanguage. Then, some of the incomprehensible expression samples have been analyzed from the following four semantic levels, i.e. lexical meaning, propositional meaning, structural meaning and contextual meaning. Finally, the results have been obtained, which show:1. Incomprehensible expression may suggest the most serious difficulty in constructing and interpreting meaning. The findings show that such errors stem from the insufficiency of the target language input instead of transfer of Chinese—the native language or bad mastery of English—the target language. Therefore, the priority to the improvement of students'English level is to enlarge the input of the target language.2. Incomprehensible expression occurs mostly when the non-English majors, in the process of writing, fail to find proper ways to convey their intended meanings. By analyzing the incomprehensible expressions, EFL teachers may catch how errors occur and how meanings work in composing a composition, and find the solutions accordingly, i.e. guiding students to find proper ways to express meaning instead of merely showing them how to...