A Corpus-based Study On Cleft Constructions In Argumentative Writings Of Chinese EFL Learners

This thesis studies the use of cleft constructions in argumentative writings by Chinese EFL learners of English major, with a combination of quantitative and qualitative studies. The present study aims to explore the following research questions:(1) Are there any differences in the use of cleft constructions between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers? If yes, what are they?(2) Are there any differences in the use of cleft constructions among Chinese EFL learners at different levels? If yes, what are they?(3) Are there any problems in the use of cleft constructions in Chinese EFL learners'English writings? If yes, what are they?(a) If Chinese learners have problems in using cleft constructions, do those problems exert influences to Chinese learners'writings? If yes, on which aspects?(b) If Chinese learners have problems in using cleft constructions, are there any possible explanations?In quantitative analysis, two corpora are employed. The learner corpus is"Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners"(hereinafter SWECCL), and the native English corpus,"Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays"(hereinafter LOCNESS). In addition, retrieving tool WordSmith and analyzing tool SPSS (Statistical Product and Service Solutions) are used to obtain and calculate the numerical data. In qualitative analysis, some examples of cleft constructions in Chinese EFL learners'writings (from WECCL) will be retrieved and analyzed to examine whether there are syntactic and semantic problems and whether discourse functions of clefts are carried out in their writings, thus providing the micro-evidences for the results of the corpus analysis. The major findings of the present study are as follows:(1) The overall frequency of the cleft constructions used in WECCL is much lower than that in LOCNESS, which shows the significant underuse problem of Chinese EFL learners. For specific types of cleft constructions, there exist both overuse and underuse problems in WECCL, that is, Chinese learners tend to use much less it-clefts and more pseudo-clefts than native speakers, and the difference of it-clefts between WECCL and LOCNESS is statisticallysignificant.(2) For Chinese learners from Year 1 to Year 4, the distributions of it-clefts and pseudo-clefts ascend in Year 1 and rise to the peak in Year 2, then descend from Year 2 to Year 4. And the differences among different grades are not significant.(3) The qualitative analysis shows that Chinese EFL learners have difficulties in applying syntactically correct and semantically contrastive and unique structures of clefts into writing. And functions of cleft constructions, particularly initiation function, are not fully presented in learner's writing. L1 transfer, transfer of training and avoidance might be the possible explanations for the problems.Due to the inevitable restrictions in research, this study has some limitations. Therefore, future studies are worthy to be carried out to explore this subject further.