A Study On The Uses Of English Prepositions From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

Second Language Acquisition(SLA)has been attached importance for many years.The concept that first language(L1)influences can affect the learner's use of L2 is accepted widely.The idea that L1 influences can occur at the conceptual level is a small-scale notion,but has nonetheless been adopted by several prominent SLA researchers.That's why the Conceptual Transfer Hypothesis(CTH)is produced.This paper analysed English prepositions from the perspective of Conceptual Transfer referred to as CT here in and after,using the cases of over,under and before.This paper aims to investigate the following three questions:(1)What's the frequency of preposition chosen by this paper referred to as PP here in after?(2)In the use of those PPs,do they have different CT types?and how do they embody the Conceptual Transfer(referred to as CT here in after)?(3)How can we employ CT to explain those PP errors?Two corpora are employed in this study:the LLC(Longman Learners Corpus)and the BNC(British National Corpus)through CQPweb atLancaster.The three PPs are analysed from three perspectives:errors or examples,collocation and colligation,to examine the causes of these phenomena as well.From the specific analysis of over,under and before,none of the three prepositions is the high frequency word used by Chinese learners.For Chinese learners,the preposition over is mainly embodied in the Negative Conceptual Transfer,because the conceptual scope of Chinese phrase“?…??”is larger than the scope of preposition over,which causes the English error expression of over,easily ignored or misunderstood by the learner.The preposition under can be analyzed with the Positive Conceptual Transfer,because the Chinese phrase“?…??”covers all the English meaning of under,which is very helpful for learners to master all the expressions of under.The error of preposition before can be discussed with Negative Conceptual Transfer.Both Chinese phrase“??”and“??”cannot be completely equivalent to the meaning of before in English,so learners are easy to make mistakes in English expression.It can be drawn to a conclusion that both learners and teachers should pay attention to the language concept system and learn or teach how to adjust or rebuild a target language concept system.