Acontrastiveanalysis Of The Syntactic Errors In The English Compositions Of Chinese Students

Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis both had prevailed in the field of foreign language teaching for some time. Corpus linguistics employs computer-aided methods to help researchers to detect the frequency and distribution as well as the developing trends of errors in a much faster and more accurate manner. English syntax is the core of the English language system and also the key stress and difficult point in the process of second language acquisition of Chinese students; therefore, linguistic experts and scholars both home and abroad have made large quantities of researches concerning syntactic errors. The present study, based on the current situation of Chinese students, analyzes, on a more holistic scale, three sub-corpuses from Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), namely, high school student (st2), lower-grade college non-English majors (st3) and higher-grade college English majors (st6), with the focus on four major types of syntactic errors in CLEC: run-on sentences (sn1), sentence fragments (sn2), structural deficiency (sn8) and punctuation errors (sn9).This paper is set to answer the following research questions: How do the four types of syntactic errors distribute in each sub-corpus? What are the distribution differences among different-level compositions? What is the developing trend of these four types of syntactic errors from a diachronic perspective? How can the study enlighten syntactic learning and teaching?The run-on sentence errors which occur in st2 take up 2.97% of all its errors while in st3 and st6, the numbers are 3.69% and 0.64%. Commonly observed run-on sentence errors fall into one of these categories: shared subjects, parallel structure, adverbials used as conjunctions, misuse of anaphora and dependent clause attached to more than one main clause. Sentence fragments in st2 account for 3.01% of its total errors; they take up 2.41% in st3 and 1.14% in st6. Major types of sentence fragments found in this study are: dependent clause used as a sentence, added details fragments, noun phrases fragments, ing-/ to do fragments, missing-predicate fragments, and missing-subject fragments. Structural deficiency occupies a rate of 7.82% in st2, 2.76% in st3 and 3.50% in st6. Major types of structural deficiency are omission, pattern shifting, and improper configuration. Punctuation errors take up 6.11% of all errors in st2, 3.55% in st3 and 4.87% in st6 most of which can be classified into overuse of punctuation marks and absence of punctuation marks.Compared and studied in a vertical perspective, it can be basically concluded that the frequency of syntactic errors negatively correlates with students'proficiency level. In the horizontal comparison of different errors in each sub-corpus, the distribution of errors is not even and does not follow any fixed pattern. In st2, the most frequent errors are structural deficiency; run-on sentence errors rank the top in st3 while for st6, the most common errors are punctuation errors. The syntactic errors are mainly caused by first language negative transfer and improper training. Other than these reasons, the avoidance method may also explain some of the traits for the distribution and development trends of errors.Though the researcher has made endless efforts trying to guarantee the validity of the current study, still, due to the coverage of the corpuses, the study may fail to elaborate on details in each sub-corpus, which needs to be further developed in future study.