A Corpus-based Study Of The There-existential Clause In Chinese English Majors' Spoken And Written English

With its special construction and its discourse function, the there-existential clause arouses concern among scholars. However, most of the researches are guided by introspection and intuition, in this way the research outcomes may not be so reliable and valid due to the lack of the support of authentic language data. Moreover, the relevant researches only focus on written English and ignore the study on the common use of the there-existential clause in spoken English.Based on the theory of interlanguage and transfer, the dissertation is aimed at studying how Chinese English majors acquire and use the there-existential clause in both written and spoken English by contrastive interlanguage analysis and computer-aided error analysis among three corpora– SWECCL, BASE and FROWN.After quantitative and qualitative analyses, three conclusions are drawn as follows:1. In general, Chinese English majors have mastered the use of the there-existential clause. However, it is statistically proved that compared with native speakers, they have a tendency to overuse the there-existential clause in written English and underuse in spoken English.2. The investigation on Chinese English majors'use of the there-existential clause demonstrates that they have the written tendency in spoken English and they have a weak or even no genre awareness in spoken English.3. Five kinds of errors are committed by Chinese English majors in the use of the there-existential clause. Several factors are explored to account for these errors which are the interlingual interference, the intralingual interference and the induced interference.