Cognitive Analysis Of Preposition Errors In College Students' English Writing Based On CLEC

Preposition is one of the most active parts of speech in English. It has been the difficulty in traditional teaching. The causes of preposition errors, in recent years, become of a hot issue for linguistic experts and scholars. The study of Error Analysis began in the 1960s, at present, Error Analysis has been a very perfect system, especially recently the development of a computer corpus provides a more rich researching data for EA study. However, a lot of studies (Richard, 1971; Scott, 1974) were based on the traditional model of Error Analysis to explore the causes of preposition errors through subjective deduction. In recent years, the development of corpus provides a more rich data for people. But the recent studies still lacks the creativeness, the explanation of prepositions errors hasn't been analyzed further. The present study will make use of CLEC to describe, summarize and classify the preposition errors of college students' writing and then to explain the causes of these errors by figure-ground theory from cognitive perspective. At first, the distribution of ten most frequently used prepositions are described and analyzed. The results show that the errors are concentrated on the spatial prepositions up to 39% and concentrated on the categories of nppl (unacceptable combination with nominal) and absence & redundancy of prepositions. In addition to identify the causes of the errors, 30 Chinese learners of English were tested with a short essay and were interviewed one by one. Finally, the three factors to misuse prepositions are found. Through the analysis of four factors, the preposition errors are explained by using figure-ground theory, which are Mismatch of spatial semantics between Chinese and English, Mismatch of spatial dimension between Chinese and English, Chinese learners ignoring the function of energy transmission of English preposition and the differences of cognitive perspectives between languages influencing the acceptation or rejection of prepositions. At last, the author makes suggestions for English teaching by using corpus.