An Error Analysis Of Bare Noun Phrases In Second Language Production Of Chinese College Learners Of English

Bare noun phrases are usually defined as noun phrases (usually bare plurals) that have a plural head noun without quantifiers, determiners, articles, numerals or specifiers. Since Carlson (1977), bare noun phrases, as a cross-language phenomenon, have been arousing great interest in the circle of linguistics. Most studies have been conducted concerning English bare noun phrases. In recent decades, more attention has been paid to Chinese bare noun phrases, most of which are discussions on the interpretation of bare noun phrases in semantics, syntax and pragmatics. Generally speaking, their views can be divided into two approaches:kind-denoting analysis and ambiguous approachIt seems that the acquisition of the inflectional markings of countable nouns is not problematic to Chinese learners of English. However, it is not the case. Teaching practice indicates that Chinese learners of English have certain difficulty in adding grammatical markers to noun phrases where necessary. An apparent phenomenon to illustrate it is that quite a few bare noun phrases are used in the second language production of Chinese learners of English, especially in their writings.Few empirical studies have been conducted before on the erroneous bare noun phrases. It justifies the necessity of this present research. An empirical research was conducted on the purpose of examining the phenomenon in interlanguage grammar focusing on bare noun phrases produced by Chinese college learners of English. The theoretical approach adopted here is Error Analysis.This thesis first introduces the background, purpose and significance of the research, followed by the review of recent researches on bare noun phrases both home and abroad as well as the theory of Error Analysis and Interlanguage. And then, it illustrates the research methodology at length including the research questions, and classifies the errors of bare noun phrases based on Error Analysis. It then provides possible causes according to the statistic analysis. Finally, it comes to the conclusion and makes an attempt in the pedagogical implication of the research. A total of 60 subjects being sophomores from one university in China participated in a test consisting of error correction and guided writing tasks. They were drawn from two language proficiency groups (the high level and the low level). Claws4 and Antconc3.2.1 were employed for annotation of the collected writings. After the classification of all the errors into three categories based on Error Analysis, quantitive analysis by SPSS 13.0 based on the statistics was made to serve to discover the correlation between bare noun phrases errors rate and learners' language proficiency level.The analysis comes to the following findings:1) The bare noun phrases accuracy of Chinese college learners positively correlated with their English language proficiency level. Although high proficiency group learners in this research far exceeds low proficiency group learners in their accurate use of bare noun phrases, errors do not completely disappear.2) Bare noun phrases errors are more likely to occur when the nouns and noun phrases represent the generic reading compared with the existential reading.3) The errors may result from negative transfer, but it is not the only cause. The analysis from the new perspective of cognition indicates that the cognitive representation of nouns and noun phrases can have an influence on the erroneous usage of bare noun phrases in the production of Chinese college learners of English.