A Corpus-based Research Into The Use Of Temporral Adverbials In English Majors’ Narratives

The concept of time is the most important and essential part in human’s cognitive structure, and is the most significant content in language. When we describe a scene, it is necessary to show that the scene exists in the present, in the past or in the future, which is the relative position of two periods of time on the time axis. That is the time in language, which is the essential category. Temporal adverbials play an important role in time in linguistics. Therefore,"not all languages have formal devices to express tense and aspect, but all language use a rich variety of temporal adverbials"(Klein,1997).Based on the theories of Klein, Dowty, Hamblin, Yao Xinyue (2010) proposes the theoretical frame of temporal adverbials. The present study adopts the framework offered by Yao Xinyue in Interacion between Tense-aspect Marking and Temporal Adverbials in Chinese-English Interlanguage, and aims to find out whether there is a difference between the use of temporal adverbials found in the narrative writings written by Chinese English majors and that found in the narratives by native English writers. Based on the analysis of the differences between English majors and native English writers, it attempts to offer some constructive suggestions for the teaching of English writing.This study includes tow corpora:Chinese English majors’narratives corpus (the observed corpus) and native English narratives corpus (the reference corpus). The former one is composed of50narrative writings which were chosen from92narratives written by92sophomores of English majors from four classes at Taiyuan University of Technology. The latter one is a corpus of the84narrative works of Text A and B in Contemporary College English (Book1-4). After tagging temporal adverbials in the two corpora, this thesis analyzes134narratives by means of two instruments:AntConc and SPSS.The results could indicate:(1) According to the analysis of overall distribution of temporal adverbials in the two corpora, temporal adverbials account for4.41%of total words in English majors’narrative writings and3.07%in native English writers’ narratives, which imply that English majors use more temporal adverbials in their writings and differ significantly between the two corpora.(2) For the categories of adverbs, phrases and clauses, Chinese English learners tend to use phrases more, however, the native English writers had a tendency to use adverbs. The use of clauses are much close.(3) Chinese English majors use more words in the TAV2than in TAV1.(4) As for the categories of TAV1, Chinese English majors give a tendency to overuse them, especially the deictic adverbials and frame adverbials. On the contrary, the amounts of nondeictic adverbials are used equally in the two corpora. Among the three subclasses, at the time (deictic), until (frame), since (frame) etc. are overused by English majors, while now (deictic), after (frame), soon (deictic) are overused in the native English writers’ corpus.(5) In TAV2, Chinese English learners tend to overuse some common and frequent temporal adverbials, on one hand, the frequencies of these items are often higher than those of native writers. On the other hand, they use less temporal adverbials which demonstrated a low frequency. The overused expressions are concentrated on the when, while, often and always.This thesis covers five chapters altogether. Chapter one is the general introduction of this study in which the background, significance and objectives is presented. Chapter two is the literature review, where the classifications of temporal adverbials and previous studies relative to this study and the basic theory and classification in this thesis. Chapter three provides the methodology adopted in this thesis, in which the research design, such as the subjects, the research instruments, the research steps and the data collection, are described in detail. Chapter four, as the main part of the whole paper, deals with the presentation and explanation of the data by means of statistics. Based on the chapter four, major findings of this study are summarized, the implications, limitations and the suggestions for further studies are concluded briefly.