A Corpus-based Study On Chinese EFL Learners’Acquisition Of English There-Existential Construction

English there-existential construction has always been widely used by English learners because of its particular meaning. Also, the uniqueness and complexity of its structure has long attracted great attention from many linguists at home and abroad. Their studies of this construction are mainly theoretical, but comparatively, there are fewer studies on the acquisition of it.Based on the theories of Error Analysis and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis in Second Language Acquisition and supported by the contrastive studies of Chinese and English existential sentences, this study examines English there-existential construction used by low-level and intermediate-level Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, attempting to reveal their acquisition of this structure as an interlanguage. It aims to address the following questions:1. In comparison with native English speakers, what characteristics are presented in Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English there-existential construction?2. What regularity is reflected through the errors committed by Chinese EFL learners at different levels in their use of English there-existential construction?3. What important interlanguage features are shown in Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English there-existential construction?This is a corpus-based study. The corpora adopted in this study are two sub-corpora of CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus)-ST2and ST5. ST2consists of the writings by senior high school students with208088tokens and ST5by first-and second-year university English majors with214510tokens. Another corpus NESSIE vl (Native English Speakers’ Similarly-and Identically-prompted Essays, Version1), the substitute of LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays), is used as the reference corpus with193844tokens, the data of which are composed of essays written by native English speakers with topics of Chinese CET4, CET6, TEM4and TEM8as well as some with similar topics from corpora of British and American university students like BAWE and MICSUP. Computer softwares are Antconc3.2.2.1, a freeware concordance program which includes seven tools such as Concordance, Concordance Plot, File View, Clusters, Collocates, Word List and Keyword List and BFSU CQPweb, an online multilingual corpora searching system, used to attain the frequency of English there-existential construction in all, different forms of the structure and different types of errors in the corresponding corpus. After being searched, the data are collected and processed for the purposes of first comparing Chinese EFL learners’acquisition of the construction and English native speakers’use of it and then finding out the similarities and differences between the errors committed by ST2and ST5in the number and types. The findings are gained through the data analyses in which the reasons or causes are explained in detail and of great help to make the findings convincing.The major findings are:1) Chinese EFL learners tend to overuse English there-existential construction and prefer the basic tenses (such as present tense, past tense and future tense), simple intransitive verbs (like "come","live","stand" and "exist") and commonly seen expressions (like "there is going to be","there seems to be" and "there used to be"), but try to avoid the perfect tenses and the difficult forms. Native English speakers can make flexible use of the structure, involving richer words and more various forms. What can be further observed is that with the level of proficiency in English getting higher, Chinese students try to use fewer English there-existential sentences.2) From a lot of basic errors relevant to the tenses, agreements and the misuse of the "there+have" pattern in ST2to more difficult participle errors in ST5, the regularity of Chinese EFL learners’acquisition of the structure is seen as that conforming to the progress of human cognition, from simplicity to complexity, from elementary to advanced. But noticeably, the similar number and types of errors committed by ST2and ST5can be taken as the fossilized language problems arising at both low and intermediate English levels, which make the process of Chinese EFL learners’acquisition not always advancing but unstable. Fossilization is one of the most striking factors disturbing the regularity of second language acquisition.3) English there-existential construction being a typical interlanguage, this study on the acquisition of it can manifest that the interlanguage system is an open, permeable and dynamic continuum between native language and target language and impacted by both of them to different degree at any English learning period.This study describes the acquisition of English there-existential construction of Chinese EFL learners at low and intermediate levels and might contribute to the existing literature. Moreover, the study provides empirical proof to the explanation of interlanguage theory and can also be a meaningful reference for the use of teaching and learning strategies in second language acquisition.