A Contrastive Corpus-based Study On Lexical Chunks In English Arguments Of Chinese And American College Students

Lexical chunks are the unity of grammatical rules, semantic meanings and pragmatic contexts. Being larger linguistic formulates which appear in the real communication at high frequency and more fixed in structures, they have many advantages of being the average units in English learning. They have a close relationship with the learners'English writing and play an important role in learners'output due to their own characteristics and advantages of convenient storage, merory and extraction.With the development of computer technology, the corpus, as the main textual body that can be read by computers, has become more and more important in the field of applied linguistic study owing to its characteristics of convenience, quickness and accuracyThe present study, based on the two corpora of WECCL and LOCNESS, aims to explore the characteristics, regulations and differences of connectors, exemplifiers and active-passive sentence builders between Chinese and American college students from the following four respects: the density of lexical chunks, the richness of lexical chunks, the usuage patterns of lexical chunks, the colloquial tendency of lexical chunks. It is hoped that this study has some implications for the argumentative writing of Chinese college students.Through the text material collection as well as the mathematical statistic analysis by using the tools of Concapp2.0 and SPSS12.0, the main findings are concluded as the following:1. The density of the the connectors and active-passive sentence builders in arguments of Chinese college students is smaller than that in arguments of American college students; the density of the exemplifiers in arguments of Chinese college students is bigger than that in arguments of American college students.2. Contrasted with American college students, the richness degree of the connectors and active-passive sentence builders in arguments of Chinese college students is smaller than that in arguments of American college students; however the richness degree of the exemplifiers in arguments of Chinese college students is bigger than that in arguments of American college students3. Contrasted with American college students, connectors and exemplifiers are mainly placed at the beginning of the sentences and more active sentence builders are used in arguments of Chinese college students; however, connectors and exemplifiers are mainly placed in the middle of the sentences and more passive sentence builders are used in arguments of American college students. 4. The colloquialism in arguments of Chinese college students is demonstrated by excessive use of the 2000 high-frequency connectors and I /you active sentence builders and there is no colloquialism in exemplifiers.From the above findings, it is shown that Chinese and American college students have their own characteristics and there are some differences between them in all the four respects of density,richness,the usuage patterns and colloquialism. With regard to this, some suggestions are provided in this study to the teachers of Chinese college students:1. Enhancing the density of the connectors and active-passive sentence builders and reasonably controlling the density of the exemplifiers;2. Strengthening the richness of the connectors and active-passive sentence builders and lessening the duplication of the common exemplifiers use;3. Placing the lexical chunks of connectors and exemplifiers in the middle of the sentences more frequently and meanwhile using more passive sentence builders;4. Increasing the quantity of the low-frequency chunks and lessening the I /you active sentence builders to change the colloquial tendency.