A Study On The Functions Of Lexical Chunks By Chinese English Majors In TEM8 Writing

In recent years,the researches on lexical chunks have become one of the topics for linguists to study.A lexical chunk is a combination of words and grammar that are interspersed between words and phrases,and they are usually semi-fixed or fixed structures.CEM(Corpus for English Majors)are taken as the data source for the study.By the analysis of qualitative and quantitative,all three to six-word lexical chunks are extracted from the corpus with the help of WordSmith Tools and manual filtering procedure.Following Altenberg’s criterion(1998),according to his categorization,all these chunks are classified into three broad categories:full clauses,clause constituents and incomplete phrases.The paper answered the following three research questions.Firstly,the characteristics of the lexical chunks in TEM-8 which are refer to the frequency and richness.Secondly,the different functions of the different chunks which are based on the classification of Altenberg.Thirdly,from the analysis of the corpus,what roles do the chunks have in English writing.The statistical data in the study show that lexical chunks are very common linguistic phenomenon that occurs frequently in the learner’s language output.Obviously,learners have mastered most of the features of the lexical chunks.The three-word chunks account for the maximum ratio and the distribution trend shows that the smaller the length of the chunk,the smaller the number is.In addition,there are different types of lexical chunks,such as full clauses,incomplete clauses and clause constituent,the proportion of clause constituents is the largest,and the incomplete phrases are the second and the full clause is in the end.After the formal analysis,some functions that the chunks can serve in specific contexts are identified.They are informational function,emotional function,remarking function,moralizing function and organizing function.Finally,it is possible to help students to form three aspects of writing in English teaching.They are forming the sense of discourse,overcoming the negative transfer of the mother tongue,advancing the construction of discourse mode.