A Contrastive Study Of Characteristics Of Chinese And American English Speakers' Use Of Lexical Bundles In English Speeches Based On Corpus

Lexical bundles,with the advantages of easy storage,extraction,and application as a whole(Sinclair,1991),refer to “simply sequences of word forms that commonly go together in natural discourse”(Biber,2004).In recent years,more and more attention has been paid to the study of lexical bundles in the field of linguistics,second language acquisition and language teaching(Zhang,2014).Compared with native English speakers,Chinese English learners still have difficulties in using lexical bundles skillfully.The contrastive research on specific texts from CESCSC(Corpus of English Speech of College Students in China)and CESCSA(Corpus of English Speech of College Students in America)will produce rich results.Based on Biber's classification criteria about structure and function of lexical bundles,the author divides the 60 most frequently used lexical bundles into different categories to analyze the similarities and differences and relationship between them.The study is specifically to answer the following questions:1)What are the distribution features of lexical bundles of 3-6 words in both corpora?2)What are the similarities and differences of the lexical bundles of 3-6 words between the two corpora in structure and function?3)What kind of relationship between structural and functional types of lexical bundles of 3 to 6words?The results show that both Chinese and American students use abundant types and large number of lexical bundles in their speeches.And both Chinese and American students tend to use many more 3-word lexical bundles compared with other types of lexical bundles.What's more,the frequency of different types of lexical bundles decrease with the increase of the length of lexical bundles.However,Chinese students tend to depend more on 3-word lexical bundles and Chinese students have the tendency of using lexical bundles monotonously compared with that of American students.From the structural perspective of lexical bundles,both corpora show similar features,specifically,the distribution of some types of lexical bundles in CESCSC corpus is similar to those in CESCSA corpus.Most 3-6 word lexical bundles in the two corpora are “NP fragment” and “PPfragments”.However,the results claim there is a great difference between Chinese students and American students in usage of lexical bundles.Under the influence of Chinese culture,Chinese English students tend to use more “NP” and “VP” and less “NP+of” than American students.From the functional aspect,“referential bundles” occupy the highest ratio,“discourse organizers” and “stance expressions” take a relatively lower percentage.Even though there is no significant difference between the corpora,the relatively high proportion of “discourse organizers”and the relatively low percentage of “stance expressions” are found in CESCSC corpus.“Referential bundles” often contain the structures of “NP+of”,“PP+of”,“other NP” and“other PP” structures,which have the function of nouns and prepositions.“Stance expressions” are usually related to “Copula be” and “VP” structures.“Discurse organizers” differ from the rest two functions in that they are presented by various structures rather than some certain structures.The paper hopes to provide some guidance for English speeches and English teaching through the study of lexical bundles in English speeches of Chinese and American university students,so as to improve students' English language ability and improve their English learning.