A Corpus-based Analysis On The Acquisition Of Copula Be By The Chinese EFL Learners

This paper is devoted to the corpus-based analysis on the acquisition of English copula be by the Chinese EFL learners.With its eight forms(am,is,are,was,were, been,being and be),copula be is a difficult point for the Chinese English learners to acquire even though this copula verb should be acquired at the early stage for them. Hence,the study on the acquisition of copula be has long been a focus in the field of language acquisition.However,most of the overseas experimental studies were focused on the children or juvenile and had deficiency in the synchronic methodology while the domestic studies mainly focus on the description or summary of the grammatical items but not from the viewpoint of corpus linguistics.The Learner corpus selected in this paper is the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) with Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus(LOB) as the reference corpus,and the two corpora are dealt with by using the software Wordsmith and the collected data are analyzed by Chi-square test.This research reports some findings as follows:1) The Chinese EFL learners display a great tendency to overuse copula be in their English essays.2) There is a distinctive difference in the distributions of subjects and complements with copula be. For example,full pronouns are the most common subjects occurring with copula be while most clauses with be have adjective phrases as the complements.The pattern "full noun+ copula be + Adj" is overused by Chinese EFL learners.Besides,Full nouns as subjects with preposition phrases as complements are not used so frequently as native speakers.it as subject mainly has noun phrases and adjective phrases as complements.3) The Chinese EFL learners display a little bit overuse of the contracted forms of copula be.However,contracted be is used more frequently while contracted "be + not" is not used so frequently as native speakers.4) Tense,agreement,omission, and redundancy are the main categories where the Chinese EFL learners err.Most misuses are due to the mother tongue interference while interlingual interference, overgeneralization,ignoring and incomplete application of the rules etc.are the possible factors.5) There is significant correlation between the learners' acquisition of copula be and their proficiency level on the whole.On one hand,the overall frequencies of subjects and complements with copula be and the grammatical structures approximate those of the native speakers with the elevation of their proficiency.On the other hand,the learners' misusage of copula be appear with lower frequency as the proficiency level rises.This paper,by classifying,counting and analyzing copula be,aims at discovering learners' difficulties and error characteristics in their language learning.It can also provide implications on the English language teaching and learning.