A Comparative Study On The Use Of Negation In Compositions By Chinese English Majors And Native English Students

Negation as a very important grammatical phenomenon is studied by many scholars at home and broad.Besides,negative structures in English are becoming increasingly popular.On the basis of WECCL and COCNUS,the investigator randomly samples 200 compositions from each corpus to study.This research investigates the use of clause negation,local negation,lexical negation,scope of negation and negation of modal auxiliaries in the compositions based on Quirk's theory on negation.This study aims to find out the differences and similarities between the use of negation by Chinese English majors and native English students and the possible reasons based on a contrastive study of the use of negation in compositions by Chinese English majors and native English students.Moreover,this study aims at providing helpful references for English teaching and learning.This research employs the use of negation by Chinese English majors and native English students on the basis of quantitative and qualitative methods.The results indicate that there are significant differences in the use of negation by Chinese English majors and native English students.Clause negation through verbs is over employed in compostions of Chinese English majors.However,the negator never is more frequently employed by native English students.Local negation by negating a phrase is far more frequently used in S-WECCL.However,the most frequently used one in S-COCNUS is local negation by negating a word.Native English students more frequently use affixal negation than Chinese English majors do.The negators not,hardly and rarely are usually used in compositions to effect full negation and partial negation.The occurrence of negation of present forms of modal auxiliaries is higher than that of negation of past forms of modal auxiliaries.The differences might be mainly due to Chinese English majors' lack of understanding of English grammar and vocabulary,negative transfer of first language and writing rules.