Study On Uses Of Demonstratives In College Non-English Majors' Writings

The present thesis aims to explore the uses of demonstratives employed by Chinese non-English majors at college level. It is a corpus-based and computer-aided study. The research tries to answer the following questions: 1). What is the general feature of demonstratives used in Chinese English learners' writings?; 2). Are there any differences between different levels of English proficiencies in Chinese English learners' writings?; 3). Are there any differences between the Chinese non-English majors and native speakers?; 4). What are the potential causes for the differences in frequencies and uses of demonstratives?In order to answer these questions, authentic data collected from CLEC and the reference corpus Brown' are compared and the statistical software SPSS is employed to test the significance of difference. The comparisons with the native speakers are drawn from three categories: the nominal demonstratives, the locative demonstratives and the temporal demonstratives.The study reveals that, compared with the native speakers, the Chinese non-English majors at college level tend to underuse the demonstratives. The Chinese non-English majors at a higher level perform better than those at a lower level. In terms of the demonstratives in the three categories used by Chinese non-English majors at college level, the three categories of demonstratives are distributed unevenly, with the nominal demonstratives occurring the most frequently in the three corpora. In comparison with the native speakers, the Chinese non-English majors at college level underuse the nominal demonstratives and the locative demonstratives, but overuse the temporal demonstratives. In respect of the nominal demonstratives, it is further studied from two aspects: the demonstrative determiners and demonstrative pronouns. The Chinese non-English majors at college level show a colloquial tendency in using certain word. As for the potential reasons for these differences, they may be attributed to the mother tongue interference and the strategy of avoidance.Based on the findings of the research, some suggestions are proposed for EFL teaching and learning in China.