A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Subject It-extraposition In English Academic Writing By Chinese And British Students

With the increasingly important role of English in academic exchange,it is becoming an urgent problem how to develop academic language for foreign students and writers.Subject it-extraposition,as a typical feature of academic English language,has been studied from many different perspectives;however,few studies concern comparison in its use between native and nonnative academic writers.It is also regrettable that there haven't been any relatively systematic studies on this language phenomenon in China.So this study attempts to make a comparison between native — especially British — and Chinese students' academic articles/dissertations from syntactic and semantic aspects,combined with the methods and theories developed in previous studies.Eligible sentences are retrieved from the corpus of BAWE and self-made corpus of CAWE and then classified into 4 types of extraposed clauses and 4 types of matrix structural patterns.It can be found that British and Chinese students prefer that-,to-extraposed clauses and SVC,SV matrix patterns,especially the idiomatic collocations of adjectives with to-and passive verbs with that-.But in the frequency of use and semantic preference,a significant difference can be detected between the two corpora,which reflects the various meanings two groups of writers want the sentences to convey.In order to put the research results into practice and help improve academic English writing in China,a list of idiomatic collocations of native writers is made,giving some valuable advice and reference to teaching.