A Corpus-based Research On Lexical Chunks In Chinese English-majors’ C-E Consecutive Interpretation

Formulaicity is a universal characteristic of human language. In a certain languagecommunity, abundant formulaic sequences or lexical chunks (the two terms arefunctionally equivalent and the second term is to be used in this thesis) are usedfrequently in communication. Corpus linguistics has confirmed the prevalence of FS inboth spontaneous speech and writing (55%-80%). Related studies have also provedthat lexical chunks are beneficial to interpreting. Yet corpus-based research into therelationship between lexical chunks and quality of interpreting is rare. This study madea survey of a sub-corpus from PACCEL-S (Parallel Corpus of Chinese EFLLearners---Spoken, Wen&Wang (文秋芳&王金铨2009), seeking to find out thepatterns and characteristics of the use of lexical chunks by Chinese English-majors inC-E consecutive interpretation and the correlation between the use of lexical chunksand students’ overall interpreting quality. The results indicate that learners tend tounderuse lexical chunks compared with native oral data. In terms of types of lexicalchunks, structurally speaking, the most commonly used type by learners was clausalchunks; functionally speaking, the most commonly used type by learners wasreferential chunks. In addition, the use of lexical chunks was closely correlated withinterpreting quality. The total number of lexical chunks in high-quality interpreting wassignificantly larger than that in lower-quality interpreting, and the difference wasmanifested in lexical chunks of varying lengths. Pedagogical implications arediscussed on the basis of these findings.