A Corpus-based Analysis Of Misuse Of There-be Constructions By Chinese English-learners

Taking the there-be construction from CLEC as the research target,the present study firstly identifies the errors,and then classifies them into six types,and finally finds out the underlying reasons.Combining the quantitative method and the qualitative method,this paper divides errors of English there-be constructions into tense misuse,subject-predicate disagreement,violation of definiteness restriction,mixed errors,constitutive omission,and other errors.In the meanwhile,each type of errors will be explained with typical examples extracted from CLEC.The results have shown the major findings as below:(1)The subject-predicate disagreement accounts for 38%,which is in the largest percentage among all error types.Learners are inclined to neglect the concordance in person and number.(2)Mixed errors take up 19%.They are mainly "there-have","there-be have","there + modal verbs have" structures,etc.,which take the place of the correct forms of there-be constructions.(3)The proportion of the constitutive omission is 18%.The most common type is the relative pronoun omission in embedded clauses,which is shown with two predicates in a syntactical structure.(4)Tense misuse occupies 12%.Learners misuse the simple present tense to generalize the past tense and future expressions.(5)The violation of definiteness restriction is in a small proportion.Learners may produce the form of "there-be+definite NP/NPs"in their writings.(6)The rest are also demonstrated in this thesis.The present study accounts for the reasons of these errors from various perspectives:the negative Chinese transfer,the intra-lingual interference,the different nature of Chinese and English,and the divergence of learners’ English skills,etc.Finally,the last part explores some feasible suggestions to reduce these errors,which may be beneficial for Chinese English-learners to better understand and use there-be constructions.