The Corpus-based Research On The Acquisition Of Lexical Chunks Of Preposition

Lexical chunk as a form-function pairing has greater pragmatic significance than a single word,thus being more advantageous in promoting the fluency and accuracy of language production.Lexical chunks also occupy a great proportion in both vernacular language and written language.Therefore,it is advocated that lexical chunk should be regarded as the basic unit in language teaching.According to previous research,prepositions are most frequently used by Chinese learners(CL)and there existing high erroneous rate in using prepositions,thus drawing wide attention in second language acquisition research.Most of the researchers mainly study on the errors made by CL in using prepositions,preposition collocation,and semantic items of prepositions.Some of the researchers direct at a single preposition while others discuss CL's use of prepositions as a whole.The present study on the lexical chunks of prepositions gives a thorough and detailed description of CL's acquisition of lexical chunks of prepositions.Therefore,the thesis studies on CL's acquisition of lexical chunks of prepositions,taking IN for example.The present study aims at comparing the differences between higher level learners and native speakers,between higher level learners and lower level learners,in using IN lexical chunks in terms of frequency and variety of IN lexical chunks,discussing the patterning and characteristics of IN lexical chunks used by CL,and analyzing their deviations of using IN lexical chunks in comparison with native speakers,so as to reveal CL's rules of the acquisition of IN lexical chunks and have implication for English teaching.The development of scientific technology promotes the application of corpus in language study and enhances quantitative research.Therefore,the thesis adopts the corpus-based approach,with the Chinese learner corpus,SWECCL as the observing corpus,with the native speaker corpora,Flob and Frown,as the reference corpora,to compare and analyze the difference of the use of IN lexical chunks between CL and native speakers.The sub-corpora,higher-level learner corpus and lower-level learner corpus are generated from SWECCL for comparison.The research findings indicate that 1)CL and native speakers use five categories of IN lexical chunks,i.e.clause builder,clause constituents,semi-complete phrase,IN+NP phrasal structure,polywords.Groups of higher proficiency comparatively have a more balanced use of the five categories.2)Clause constituents and IN+NP phrasal structure take a large percentage both in native corpora and learner corpora.However,learners,in particular lower level learners lack diversity in using clause constituents and IN+NP phrasal structure.Both higher level learners and lower level learners overuse IN+NP phrasal structure.3)Clause builders,semi-complete phrase and polywords are much less frequently used than the two categories above and there is a significant difference in the use of these three categories between lower level learners and native speakers.The three categories are underused and they evidently confirm themselves as the most difficult ones in the acquisition of preposition IN.4)Integrally,Chinese English learners deviate from native speakers in overusing the IN lexical chunks in which the constitutional items has great substitutability and under-using the IN lexical chunks that have great idiomaticity and conventionality.All the research findings have implication for English teaching.