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Research On Chinese English Learners’ Realization Of Lexical Cohesion In Meaning Units

Posted on:2014-02-10Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:L J ZhangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2235330395477395Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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Vocabulary, as the most fundamental component of language, has long been the focus of study. This study chooses CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) and LFF (the combination of LOCNESS, FLOB and FROWN) as the learners’corpus and the native speaker’s corpus respectively. Three verbs suppose, seek, reduce and three nouns attention, effort and impression are picked out as the node words to be studied. The analysis method of "lexical item" model, put forward by Sinclair, is applied in this study. Through a careful observation of concordance lines of each word and an analysis of each word’s collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody, a comparative study in the features of lexical cohesion between Chinese English learners and native speakers is done in this study.The study result indicates that Chinese English learners produce fewer types of collocates, compared with native speakers. There are a number of typical collocations shared by both of them, though they differ in frequency and MI score. The learners also use lots of interlanguage collocations, which is sometimes not properly used or even unacceptable. The models of lexical co-occurrence in the compositions of Chinese English learners are simplex or not correct. While Chinese English learners do better in the major senses, namely the first senses of word learned, which usually falls in the overlapping semantic category of Chinese and English. Learners are more likely to ignore other uses of the words and become used to the only corresponding meaning of both English and mother tongue. Therefore, the colligation patterns of each word in CLEC are a lot fewer than those in LFF. Compared with the native speakers, the level of Chinese English learners’lexical cohesion is relatively low.
Keywords/Search Tags:corpus, meaning unit, lexical cohesion, lexical item, collocation
PDF Full Text Request
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