A Comparative Study Of Chinese And English In Prepositions Of "Being" And "From"

Preposition is a kind of function words both in Chinese and English. They cannotbecome a part of a sentence alone unless they form the preposition structure withnouns, pronouns and prepositions, etc. Though prepositions belong to function words,they play a rather significant part both in Chinese and English. Prepositions includespatial prepositions whose number is small. But they are not only the important butalso the difficult part. So far, most researches have paid more attention to the analysisof prepositions between Chinese and English while few researches have conductedspatial preposition between Chinese and English. What’s more, the researches aboutteaching Chinese as a foreign language are much less.This paper picks up two spatial prepositions “zai”、“cong” which are easy tomake mistakes for foreign students. It also compares the two spatial prepositions“zai”、“cong” between Chinese and English on the basis of previous studies. Thispaper collects the categories of error which foreign students made with the help ofHSK Dynamic Composition Corpus. Besides, it concludes the causes of the errors andfinally came up with the corresponding teaching strategies. This paper is divided intosix chapters:The first chapter is the introduction and it introduces the reason of choosing thetitle, the relative researches of the preposition, the resource of the corpus, the methodsof the research and the scope of the study.The second and the third chapter are the Error Analysis of the two spatialprepositions of “zai”、“cong” which are the core parts of this paper. They give adetailed analysis about the two spatial prepositions “zai”、“cong” in terms ofcomparing them between Chinese and English. And then collects the similarities anddifferences in aspects of semantic and syntactic functions. At the same time, thispaper puts HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus as the main source of corpus andanalyzes the errors which foreign students made when they learn the two spatialprepositions “zai”、“cong”. The main categories of the error are the missing,redundancy and misuse of the preposition “cong” and directional words. The fourth chapter is the part of the causes of foreign students’ error and theauthor analyzes the reasons of those errors which refer to three aspects: negativetransfer of native language, over-generalization of target language and the deficienciesof the textbooks. These errors are made by foreign students when they learn the twospatial prepositions “zai”、“cong”.The fifth chapter is the teaching proposals. According to the error and thereasons of the errors that foreign students who speak English made when they learnthe two spatial prepositions “zai”、“cong”. Thus this chapter puts forward thecorresponding suggestions for teaching Chinese as a foreign language which mainlyinclude two aspects: the layout of the teaching materials and the teaching methods ofthe two spatial preposition “zai”、“cong”.The sixth chapter is the conclusion. The author gives a summary of the wholepaper and puts forward the deficiencies of the paper.