A Contrastive Study Of While In Light Of The Lexical Priming Theory

As a frequently used word in English,while has two commonly used parts of speech,which are conjunction and noun,in the dictionary.While as a conjunction has four meanings:during the time that sth is happening;at the same time as sth else is happening;however;although;the noun has only one meaning: a period of time.But previous studies on while mainly focus on the subjectification process of it or the use of while and its synonyms,such as when and as.There is little research on the contrastive study of while between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers.The purpose of this study is to explore the similarities and differences between native speakers and Chinese EFL learners in the frequency of use and priming patterns of different meanings of while,which will be of value for English teaching as well as dictionary compilation.Based on Hoey's lexical priming theory,this study conducts corpus-based research to explore the differences in frequency of use and priming patterns of different meanings of while between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers.The corpora used in the study are CLEC(Chinese Learner English Corpus)and LOCNESS.The findings are as follows.Firstly,in terms of frequency of use,compared with native speakers,Chinese EFL learners use the noun of while with normal frequency,and as for the conjunction of while,they use the first two meanings normally,but use the third meaning more frequently and the fourth meaning less frequently.In addition,according to the Chi-square test,the third meaning of while is significantly overused in CLEC,but the fourth meaning is significantly underused in CLEC.Secondly,in the priming patterns,when the word while functions as a conjunction followed by adverbial clauses of time and concession,or connect compound sentences,the similarities are that there are simple sentences in the clauses or the compound sentences,and the priming patterns of the third meaning of while are similar in CLEC and LOCNESS.The difference is that compared with native speakers,Chinese EFL learners' grammatical constructions of the sentences are simpler,and they lack varieties in grammatical constructions.This study mainly reveals the similarities and differences in the priming patterns ofdifferent meanings of while between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers,with a view to enlightening English teaching and dictionary compilation.In the teaching process,teachers should teach vocabulary and grammar knowledge as a whole.Besides,in the compilation of syllabus and teaching materials,the editors should attach importance to the collocation of words and sentences,especially the authentic expressions of native speakers.And in dictionary compilation,corpus resources should be used to provide more examples of native speakers' vocabulary collocation,so that Chinese EFL learners can know more about standard English expressions and learn to use them in their writings.