The Use Of Be + Past Participle Construction In English Writing Of Chinese College Students

The reason why this thesis does not bear the title The Use of Passive in English Writing of Chinese College Students is that "passive" has caused some confusion. "Passive" has become a near vacuous term (Granger,1983). According to Sylviane Granger, it, basically, is either defined semantically or formally. If it is used as a semantic notion, it refers to all structures in which the subject functions as "undergoer" or "sufferer", i.e. cases such as He found himself threatened, He had his hair cut, etc. If one adopts this semantic definition, it seems that there are almost no limit to the kind of structure one can incorporate (Granger). There are no priori reasons why one should exclude cases such as He suffered a heavy headache or He got the sick. When "passive" is defined formally, it either refers to all be (or get, feel, become)+past particle constructions or only to a subset of these.Linguists differ greatly in the exact composition of the subset of structures to which they will assign the label "passive". As a consequence, different books or articles entitled the Passive may turn out to deal with totally different structures or study it from different perspectives. Under such circumstances, Sylviane Granger proposed to use Be+Past Participle Construction instead of passive. She, therefore, has broken down this structure into seven categories on the basis of structural, lexical, and semantic criteria, only one of which is called passive. According to her, Be+Past Participle Construction has more general meaning than that of passive.On the basis of a comprehensive review of the current theoretical background, this work presents a contrastive study on the differences between native speakers and non-native speakers concerning the Be+Past Participle Construction. A systematic contrastive analysis is conducted on real-life linguistic data collected from Chinese Learners English Corpus (CLEC) and Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). Considering that superficial well-formedness itself is not a guarantee of freedom from errors, manual qualitative classification has been utilized in addition to computer-based quantitative statistics to ensure the adequacy of our work which would otherwise have been inadequate. Discussion is presented in three steps:1) date collection and classification,2) contrast and analysis of the data,3) find and explain the differences and similarities in the data.The author attempts to conduct a contrastive analysis between Chinese college learners'English writing and native speakers'in acquiring the Be+Past Participle Construction from the perspectives of verb types and grammar. It tries to detect the similarities and differences between Chinese college students and native college students. Some conclusions have been drawn as follows: 1) Chinese college English learners much underuse this construction in comparison with native speakers. We also found that the percentage of Chinese college English learners in using this form is 12.69 per one hundred sentences while that of native speakers is 24.69.2) Chinese learners with different English levels are greatly different in terms of the use of Be+V-ed construction. Students that use Be+V-ed construction most are senior English majors, who are followed by junior English majors. It is out of our expectation that Be+V-ed forms which occur in College English Band 6 are less often than that in College English Band 4. Chinese English learners misemploy too many word forms of passives and the inadequate use of passives.3) In terms of the use of the seven types of Be+Past Participle Construction, Chinese college English learners show no significant difference in the use of verbal pseudo-passive, mixed Be+V-ed combinations and usually passive category. And Chinese English learners tend to produce more agentful passives compared to native speakers.4) Learners with different English proficiency display different features in the use of Be +Past Participle Construction. As a whole, learners with high English proficiency master this form better than those with low English proficiency. In the choice of passive verbs, they also tend to choose some frequently used verbs resulting from the small vocabulary size. Such verbs as consider, do, find, give, made, or use are almost always employed by Chinese college English learners in passive constructions, and predominantly in the present tense.The research is just a tentative study on the use of Be+Past Participle Construction by Chinese college English learners. It describes and explains Chinese students'respective linguistic behavior, so as to offer some useful suggestions for references in foreign language instructions. And it is hoped that the findings will be of great significance in the teaching and learning of Be+Past Participle Construction.