A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study On The Use Of Disjuncts In Spoken English Between Chinese English Learners And Native Speakers

Disjunct is a type of adverbial,which commonly expresses personal feelings,attitudes,value judgments or assessments such as frankly speaking,personally,to be honest and so on.It is an indispensable structure in English grammar and has been studied by a lot of linguists and grammarians,while before now little has been said about disjuncts in China.Few of grammarians only focused on the basic definition and usage of disjuncts.The aim of the present study is to investigate the similarities and differences in the use of disjuncts on its type,frequency and placement by Chinese English learners and native English speakers.Under the guidance of corpus linguistics and Granger's Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis(CIA),this thesis investigated Chinese English learners' acquisition of disjuncts in spoken language.The following research questions have been formulated:1)How do Chinese English speakers and native English speakers use disjuncts as evidenced in two corpora? 2)What are the top ten disjuncts items in SECCL and BNC?How do they differ from each other? 3)Do Chinese English learners overuse/underuse disjuncts compared with native speakers? 4)If yes,what might be the possible factors to the overuse or underuse of the Chinese English learners?The research examined SECCL(Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners)and BNC(British National Corpus),using PMW(per million words)as standard frequency.The researcher analyzed the use of disjuncts through a contrastive way to identify the significance of the difference in the use of disjuncts.Every item of target disjuncts was extracted from the two corpora,and not only the frequency counts but also the position of target disjuncts were examined.On the basis of part-of-speech tagging in BNC and the structure of disjuncts,the search item was designed as \A-Z*ly_AV0 \,\.*ly_AV0 \,\,*ly_AV0 \,|\;*ly_AV0 \,\,*ly_AV0 \.Using the indexer function of BNC,theresearch analyzed the frequencies in different aspects such as area,text domain and so on in spoken sub-corpus of BNC.The annotation tool Tree-Tagger was used to tag the part of speech of the raw data in SECCL.The search items,as *ly_RB,,*ly_RB,and*ly_RB,were operated to identify the required structure of disjuncts in SECCL.AntConc was used to figure out the frequencies used in SECCL.Moreover,the research employed the statistical tool—SPSS(16.0)to analyze the Chi square between BNC and SECCL.Frequency counts and log-likelihood calculations were utilized to determine if the frequency differences between two corpora reached statistical significance.The research showed that there were plenty of features related to disjuncts.Firstly,disjuncts occur mostly during dialogues because it is used to give response most of the time.Secondly,there is no clearly restriction on speaking area as the data told that people use disjuncts no matter where they are part of the nation.Thirdly,people aged from fifteen to twenty-four use disjuncts more frequently,which conforms that people still in education use disjuncts more frequently.Fourthly,female speakers have a larger share of disjuncts than male speakers do because female speakers are willing to express their personal feelings and attitudes.Fifthly,the placement of disjuncts are similar in both SECCL and BNC,which suggests that Chinese English learners have the same habit as the native and they try to make their discourse well organized.However,in comparison to the disjuncts usage by English native speakers,the Chinese English learners significantly overuse the disjuncts in sentence initial position.Both similarities and differences were found across the corpora analysis.Firstly,the top ten disjuncts of high frequencies in SECCL are firstly,actually,thirdly,fortunately,recently,unfortunately and really,whereas the top ten disjuncts in BNC are really,obviously,actually,exactly,absolutely,certainly,probably,firstly,secondly and basically.Secondly,compared with English native speakers,the Chinese English learners tend to significantly underuse disjuncts in their speech in general.Thirdly,while both the learners and the native speakers rely heavily on a limited disjuncts in their speech,the Chinese English learners are found overuse certain disjuncts as suddenly,secondly,finally,while they significantly underuse such disjuncts as obviously,exactly,probably.Fourthly,both Chinese English learners and nativespeakers prefer to put disjuncts at initial position and much less in the end of sentence,but Chinese English learners often put disjuncts at the initial position and relatively less at the end position.The factors underlying what is found in learners' use of disjuncts are multifold,such as mother tongue influence,teaching instructions,the limitation of exam-oriented corpus and so on.The research findings shed lights on the perspective of language research,teaching and learning.In theory,the present study confirms that corpus linguistics as a scientific theoretical framework can help to conduct empirical research and the research enriches the contrastive interlanguage analysis.Pedagogical implications of the present study are to improve teaching practices and materials such as implementing extensive awareness-rising activities on disjuncts and including authentic examples in the English teaching materials.Chinese English learners should try to enlarge their vocabulary and vary their choice of disjuncts in their writing and speaking.All in all,although this research described and explained the use of disjuncts,not only in native English speakers but also Chinese English learners,providing some useful implications for foreign language teaching and learning,there may remain some shortcomings in the research methods and analytic tools,which requires further improvement.