Influence Of L2 On L1 At Lexical And Syntactic Levels In Chinese Abstracts Of MA Theses

English, an important means of communication, plays an important role in many aspects of people's lives. In China,English is listed as a significant subject in national curriculum from primary school to college. In terms of second language acquisition for English major and non-English major students, numerous scholars conducted abundant researches. However, with regard to first language production of Chinese-English bilinguals, little attention was paid to this aspect. This paper intends to consider the influence of second language on first language at lexical and syntactic levels from the perspective of reverse transfer.With multi-competence theory as theoretical basis, the research is carried out with two self-constructed corpora. One corpus is consisted of 50 MA thesis Chinese abstracts by English major postgraduates from five universities of China and the other one is composed of 50 MA thesis Chinese abstracts by Chinese major postgraduates from the same five universities. The two corpora are comparable. Total numbers of words for two corpora are both around 40000 and number of words in each abstract is within the range of 500-1100. The publishing year of each abstract falls into 2010-2016. Subjects of s are either literature or linguistics. By reviewing previous studies, the author chooses to investigate the uses of personal pronouns, conjunctions,prepositions,"one plus classifier" structure,passive "bei" structure and sentences with subjects between the two groups of subjects. With the help of NLPIR and Microsoft Word software, the author calculates use frequencies of the above-mentioned six aspects in each abstract and analyzes the statistics through SPSS 22.0. Two questions are to be answered: (1) What are the differences between the Chinese abstracts of English majors' MA theses and those of Chinese majors' MA theses at lexical and syntactic levels? (2) What are the potential reasons for the differences?Research results show that the uses of personal pronouns, prepositions, passive"bei" structure and sentences with subjects by English major postgraduates are significantly different from that of Chinese major postgraduates and in terms of conjunctions and "one plus classifier" structure, no significant difference exists between the two groups. In this way, four of the six aspects of native language are subjected to reverse transfer in term of English major postgraduates. To explain the differences, the author resorts to L2 influence on LI and multi-competence in high-proficiency English major postgraduates. Because of intensive English learning for English major postgraduates, there are two systems of languages in their minds and English is possible to influence Chinese. English is hypotactic while Chinese is paratactic; English is static while Chinese is dynamic; English is characterized by impersonal while Chinese features the use of personal; English is subject-prominent while Chinese is topic-prominent.These different language features bring about certain differences in the uses of personal pronouns,prepositions, passive "bei" structure and sentences with subjects in terms of English major postgraduates, to put it another way, reverse transfer occurred. In our research,we find that to a certain extent, high-level English major postgraduates adopt English language style in Chinese abstracts and we ascribe the phenomenon to the influence of L2 on L1.