A Corpus-based Comparative Analysis Of The Noun Phrase Structure In The Chinese And American College Students’ Writing Assignments

Noun phrases are important components in a sentence structure,which are also a main target of English writing research. This thesisexplores different uses of noun phrases between the Chinese Englishmajor students and the American college students, and also thecomplexity of noun phrase structures of each group within the frameworkof Quirk’s noun phrase classification and Ma Dongmei’s proposal of nounphrase complexity.This study aims at doing the following research:1) Comparison ofnoun phrase uses made by the Chinese English major students and theAmerican college students, comparison of the NP1(determiner+noun),NP2((Determiner) Pre-modifiers+Noun), NP3((Determiner) Noun+Post-modifiers), NP4((Determiner) Pre-modifiers+Noun+Post-modifiers) frequencies of the top ten nouns used by these two groupsof students;2) Comparison of the complexity of their noun phrasestructures;3) Reasons for the differences and similarities in their use ofthe noun phrases.The major findings of this thesis are as follows: both the Chineseand American students use NP1a lot, yet there is no significant differencebetween them. As for the structures of NP2, NP3and NP4, there aresignificant differences between the two groups of students. The Chinese English major students use much more NP2than the American students,which is mainly due to the influence of the Chinese language. SinceChinese is a left-branching language, the Chinese learners are accustomedto put all the modifiers before the head word. English is a language whichcan have both pre-modifiers and post-modifiers in its noun phrases.Therefore the significant difference of NP3and NP4is also huge. TheChinese students use these kinds of structures much less than theAmerican students. What’s more, the complexity of noun phrases madeby these two groups of students is also different. Noun phrases used bythe Chinese students are simpler than those used by the Americanstudents.The findings of this study suggest that writing teachers could havea good understanding of the Chinese students’ weakness in writing,especially in their use of noun phrases, and guide them onto the right pathof improvement. This thesis enriches the research of second languagewriting, and makes some contribution to the corpus-based study of thesecond language writings by the non-native speakers.