Corpus-based Analysis Of Chinese College Students’"Two-predicate" Errors In There-be Structures In Contrast To Native Speakers’ Language Use

The there-be structure, which is also called “existential structure”, is an importantand peculiar sentence pattern in modern English. Because of its peculiarity, it hasalready aroused a wide-spread concern. For example, Chomsky (1965,1986,1991)spared no efforts to interpret the definition of “existence”, however, even nowadaysnobody could define the word “existence” properly. Based on the traditionalgrammatical rules, domestic scholars have done a series of researches into there-bestructures. However, there seem to be no systematic investigation or analysis oftwo-predicate errors in there-be structures, especially those errors in Chinese collegestudents’language output.The major purpose of this study is to investigate and analyze how Chinese collegestudents use there-be structures. Three corpora and one translation test are adopted inthe thesis. The software tool AantConc is employed as a retrieval instrument toretrieve data from Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) so as to investigate howChinese college students use there-be structures. Corpus of Contemporary AmericanEnglish (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC) are adopted as the controlledcorpus for comparison. What is more, a translation test is designed for furtherunderstanding Chinese college students’use of there-be structures.This thesis is an empirical study of language use in there-be structures, which isbased on the investigation of CLEC, COCA, BNC and a translation test. The theoriesof error analysis, constructive analysis and language transfer serve as the theoreticalbasis of this study. This paper will address the following questions:⑴In what linguistic context do two-predicate errors occur in there-be structures?⑵What might be the possible causes of Chinese college students’ two-predicateerrors in there-be structures?⑶What pedagogical implications can we get from the research results?The corpus-based study reveals that there turns out to be a great difference in the use of there-be structures between native English speakers and Chinese collegestudents. The sentence patterns of “There be+NP/Pronoun+Relative Clause”,“There be+NP/Pronoun+Infinitive” and “There be+NP/Pronoun+Present/PastParticiple” are widely used in both written and spoken contexts by native Englishspeakers. However, Chinese college students can only have a good command of the“There be+NP/Pronoun+Locative Adverbial” sentence structure. The researchresults show that the sentence structure “There be+NP/Pronoun+Past Participle” isused much less frequently by Chinese college students than by native Englishspeakers, and a very small number of students are capable of employing the structuresof “There be+NP/Pronoun+Relative Clause” and “There be+NP/Pronoun+Infinitive” to express the conception of existence.Serial-verb construction is the unique sentence pattern in Chinese. However,only a set of subject-predicate can be used in an English sentence. Many studentsneglect the difference between the target language and their mother tongue. As aresult, students often misuse or overuse there-be structures to translate Chineseexistential sentences with the verb “有”(pronounced as “you” in Chinese, forconvenience and brevity of writing, the Chinese “you” structure will be usedthereafter in this thesis). Therefore, a large number of two-predicate errors emerged intheir language output.The major causes of Chinese college students’ two-predicate errors in there-bestructures might be the serious interference of their mother tongue, i.e. they fail toemploy the structures of “There be+NP/Pronoun+Relative Clause” and “There be+NP/Pronoun+Infinitive”. Their lack of such knowledge implies that there is avacancy in the teaching and learning of there-be structures. Hopefully, this researchwill be of some pedagogical value in the future.