Corpus-based Study On Prepositional Errors By Chinese English Learners

This paper aims to study prepositional errors committed by Chinese Englishlearners on the basis of Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and it also seeks toanswer the following three research questions:1) What are the characteristics of prepositional errors by Chinese English learners?2) What are the possible causes and explanation for the prepositional errors byChinese English learners?3) Is L1 interference regarded as the major reason for prepositional errors byChinese English learners?Characteristics of prepositional errors made by Chinese English learners arediscovered:First, we find that prepositional errors from ST3 are the most, prepositionalerrors from ST6 are the fewest and the number of prepositional errors from ST2, ST4and ST5 are approximate to each other. Second, 38 prepositions are found misused infive sub-corpora of CLEC. Third, given the data, we find that in, at, on, to, for are thefive most frequently misused prepositions by Chinese English learners,with in rankingthe first. Fourth, three major error categories of prepositions are errors in the form ofomission, of substitution and of redundancy.Two possible causes are suggested in the present study for the prepositionalerrors by Chinese English learners, which are interlingual transfer and intralingualtransfer.According to the statistics, altogether 647 interlingual errors are committed byChinese English learners, accounting for 56.6% of the total. It is obvious that L1interference should be considered as the major reason for prepositional errors made byChinese English learners.