A Contrastive Analysis Of Chinese Learners' And Native Speakers' Use Of English VOC

Complex transitive complementation(VOC)is a complicated and important structure in the English grammar.Unfortunately,in classroom teaching and learning,neither teachers nor students have paid enough attention to it.With the aim of helping Chinese learners improve their use of VOC,the present research was intended to investigate Chinese learners' use of the English VOC in writing,their errors and the causes,based on the comparison between BNC(British National Corpus)and WECCLE,which is a sub-corpus of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SWECCL).The English VOC falls into seven types based on Quirk's classification.Author designs the query items,on the basis of the features of the structures,and the part-of-speech tagging in BNC.Analyses are made on the frequencies and distributions of the structures in the written sub-corpus of BNC,across different periods,in different domains,and so on,on the basis of what the target verbs are sampled.AntConc is used to obtain the frequencies of the structures in WECCLE.Chi-square tests in SPSS are employed to analyze the differences in frequency ratio between BNC and WECCLE.The result shows significant differences between them in using VOC.The research finds that VOC exists in large quantities,up to 24,440 cases,in the written sub-corpus of BNC,and has a wide range of applications,regardless of time,sex,age,text types,and other elements.VOC_n is most frequently used by native speakers.In contrast,in WECCLE,there are 6,138 cases of the use of VOC.The type of complementation by object and adjunct is most frequently used by Chinese learners.In the end,3 verbs,MAKE,GET,and SEE,are selected as the sample verbs to observe whether Chinese-speaking learners make errors when they used them.The result shows that they commit errors,which L1 interference errors,overgeneralization errors,andthe other reasons are the main types of errors in Chinese learners' use.The research expands the scope of studies on VOC,reveals the characteristics of native speakers and Chinese EFL learners' use of VOC and the differences between them in using VOC,and analyzes the main types of error Chinese learners commit when they use MAKE,GET,and SEE in VOC.This research provides some important reference significance for English learning and teaching.