A Corpus-Based Study Of Be Omission Committed By Chinese High School Learners

The English verb be is an important grammatical item at the early stage of English learning. However, because of its complicated forms and functions, the acquisition of be poses many problems for Chinese EFL beginners, among which be omission is one of the most frequent phenomenons. Hence, a study of be omission can better our understanding of the acquisition of be and thus facilitate the learning of verb be. However, so far, there are quite few related researches. Moreover, most of them only focus one possible factor that might affect be omission, leading to different explanations for be omission. In order to find a unified account, the present study explores the interlanguage rules of be omission from a more comprehensive perspective by investigating all the possible factors mentioned in previous researches, including grammatical function of be, semantic type of predicates, finiteness of be, subject type and degree adverb.Based on data from the sub-corpus of CELE, the present study focuses on be omission committed by Chinese high school learners and puts forward the following two questions:(1)Which factors significantly affect the occurrence of be omission by Chinese high school learners among five factors (grammatical function of be, semantic type of predicates, finiteness of be, subject type, degree adverb)?(2)What individual effects and interactive effects do these factors exert on the occurrence of be omission?With the help of statistical analyses such as Chi-square test, Z test, loglinear analysis, this study has found be tends to be omitted under three conditions. First, be precedes a stage-level predicate; second, be is nonfinite; third, be acts as auxiliary be. Semantic type of predicates plays the most important role on be omission, finiteness second, grammatical function third, which indicates the first condition can best predict be omission. In the third condition, there is an exception when it is not effective. That is, in nonfinite situations, copula be is more likely to be omitted than auxiliary be.Further investigation into the interlanguage rules also reflects be omission by Chinese high school learners is closely related to the acquisition of temporality and mainly results from the interaction of Temporal Anchoring Requirement(TAR) proposed by Becker (2000) and L1 transfer. In addition, semantic emptiness and chunking learning also make some contributions.Thus, this study not only has important pedagogical implications on the teaching and learning of verb be, and also theoretically sheds some lights for researches on the acquisition of temporality of Chinese EFL learners and second language acquisition in general.