A Corpus-based Study On Colloquialisms In Academic Writing By MA English Postgraduates

Colloquialism in academic writing,with its inaccurate nature,seriously affects what authors intend to express in writing.This thesis mainly studies colloquialisms in Chinese MA theses by English postgraduates and analyzes the possible causes as well as gives rational suggestions.Based on existing research results of colloquialisms in writing,this study examines the colloquialisms in the self-built Chinese MA theses by English postgraduates Corpus(EMA Corpus),with over 1500000 tokens in comparison with Academic Corpus of British National Corpus(BNC-ACADEMIC)at two levels:lexical level and syntactic level.The major findings in this study are as follows:1.Colloquialism distributes more significantly in Chinese MA theses than in BNC-ACADEMIC,but still at an acceptable level.2.In EMA Corpus,the significant features are as follows:(1)Compared with other colloquial vocabulary,several notional words are frequently used;indefinite pronouns in colloquial vocabulary are less frequently employed.(2)Hedges are less employed except "about","most".(3)"That" in demonstrative pronouns has higher frequency.(4)Contractions-n't and-'s occur frequently.(5)First person reference in writer/reader visibility has higher frequency than second person reference.In first person reference,"I" and "we" are the most frequently employed.(6)The use of conjunctions in discourse markers is significantly higher than others.(7)Phrasal verbs are less employed except "find out" and "put forward".(8)The distribution of "there be" structures in EMA Corpus is similar to BNC-ACADEMIC.3.Most of colloquialisms are caused by negative transfer from second language acquisition perspectives.At last,based on findings of this research,this paper gives suggestions on academic writing for Chinese English learners for better proficiency in this regard.