A Corpus-Based Study Of Prepositional Errors In Writing By Chinese Non-English Majors

This thesis is a corpus-based study of prepositional errors in writing by Chinese non-English majors. Based on Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), the present study adopts corpus approach to examine errors of the ten most frequently used prepositions in writing by Chinese non-English majors (College English Test Band-4) and discusses the origin of these prepositional errors.English is a language of prepositions. English prepositions are characterized by polysemy, multi-funciton and high frequency. Their characteristics make prepositions rank the second in the top three most difficult target language items for Chinese learners, i.e. articles, prepositions and verbs. The variety of prepositional use and strong grammatical function bring Chinese English learners many difficulties in writing. The prepositional learning difficulty mainly lies in the use of prepositions, prepositional phrases and preposition collocations.Cognitive linguists, structuralists and functionalists have studied English prepositions from different perspectives. Their researches are theoretically significant and greatly help Chinese students understand English prepositions more profoundly. This study takes in their theoretical results and focuses on prepositional errors in learners' writing rather than preposition understanding so that prepositions can be investigated from a new perspective.Few studies have been conducted specifically on prepositional errors both in China and abroad. A number of studies (Richard, 1971, Scott, 1974 and Mukattash, 1976) provide descriptions of the different kinds of linguistics errors produced by learners based on the traditional error analysis (EA). Prepositional errors are only mentioned with shallow and broad analysis. Some studies merely display the frequency of broad types of prepositional errors along with other common errors. Very little research is concerned exclusively with prepositional errors. The only two studies of such kind are conducted by Alami (1978) and Habash (1982). Their major findings, in particular, the explanation of causes of prepositional errors are deduced by their own observation and intuition. No genuine data-based analysis is conducted. From this perspective, their findings are somewhat subjective. Therefore, the present study is carried out investigating prepositional errors, with a focus on the causes of prepositional errors. The ten most frequentlyl used prepositions occurring in College English Band-4 Corpus of CLEC are investigated by doing corpus-based analysis. The major error patterns of the ten prepositions are illustrated with examples.This research adopts English as a foreign language learners' corpus - Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) as the data source and uses retrieval software tool-Concapp. Corpus-based reretrieval software tools and manual retrieval are adopted in data collection and data analysis. Prepositional errors frequently occuring in CET-4 subcorpus of CLEC are retrieved, classified, and calculated. Representative characteristics of prepositional errors are generalized by observation and major reasons of errors are deduced during analyzing these errors. Prepositional errors fall into two categories - errors of simple prepositions and errors of prepositional phrases. The two categories are further divided into 9 subcategories - pp1 (preposition pattern error), pp2 (preposition set phrase error), wd1 (word order error), wd2 (word part of speech error), wd3 (word substitution error), wd4 (word absence error), wd5 (word redundancy error), wd6 (word repetition error), and wd7 (word ambiguity error) within which wd1, wd2, wd6, and wd7 errors are of no significance value in the present prepositional error research, so they are not studied in the present research.The study discovers that the errors are not concentrated on one particular preposition. The distribution of error rates of the ten prepositions is nearly equal. However, errors are concentrated on the category of pp1 and pp2. Thus it is suggested that English language teachers and learners should pay more attention to prepositional collocations in future English language teaching and learning.