A Comparative Study On Phrase Frames In Ph.d.Dissertations Of English Linguistics By Chinese And Foreign Writers

In the traditional view of language,Chinese English learners regard vocabulary as independent words which are governed by grammatical rules.Actually,in English natural discourse,most language structures are formulaic language with relatively fixed semantic forms.Formulaic language,as the basic unit of academic discourse,plays an important role in academic writing.Whether native English writers or second language learners,the importance of fluent and accurate use of formulaic language is self-evident.In recent years,scholars at home and abroad have made quite a lot of studies on continuous multi-word sequences and obtained some research results.Recently,researchers’ attention of foreign countries has been paid to phrase frames,whereas domestic scholars are still comparatively few on the study of phrase frames.The present study adopts the method of corpus linguistics to build two subcorpora,comparing and analyzing the similarities and differences of 4-word and 5-word phrase frames in doctoral dissertations majoring in applied linguistics at home and abroad.The domestic corpus comes from China National Knowledge Infrastructure with a total of 20 doctoral dissertations with 698,121 words,while the foreign corpus is sampled from Pro Quest with a total of 20 dissertations with 702,459 words.Then,all the 4-and5-word phrase frames are extracted from the two databases using Antgram software,and finally get valid data: 213 phrase frames in China and 139 phrase frames in foreign countries.After generating the p-frame lists of 4-and 5-word,the phrase frames in the two corpora are classified by structure and function respectively in order to uncover the similarities and differences of frequency distribution,structural and functional features of Chinese and native English writers in academic English writing.Th results show that: Firstly,in terms of frequency distribution,Chinese writers generally use more phrase frames than native English writers,whereas the type / token ratio of p-frames in foreign corpus is slightly higher than that in China,which indicates that native English writers can use more variants and the higher frequency distribution of phrase frames by domestic writers may be due to their overuse of some p-frames instead of using more variants.Secondly,with respect to structural features,domestic writers are inclined to use verb-based p-frames,while native English writers have the preference for using other-content-word p-frames and function-word p-frames,which may be attributed to the nominalization of English sentences and verbalization of Chinese sentences as well as the negative transfer of Chinese grammar.Thirdly,in functional features,Chinese writers make use of more referential function compared with English-natives,while native writers use relatively more stance expressions and discourse organizers.Moreover,domestic writers prefer to use the identification and focus under the referential category,but native English writers are apt to use specification of attributes.Lastly,it reveals that Chinese writers lack the consciousness of using discourse organizers in comparison with native English writers,which results in the deficiencies of constructing the coherence and cohesion of discourse.This study has some implications and significance for academic English teaching and writing in China.EFL teachers are inspired to utilize corpus tools to teach the most commonly used phrase frames by English natives and the variants in the slots,so as to make the output by Chinese learners more idiomatic and closer to English-native language norms,which will contribute a lot to the improvement of academic writing level of Chinese English learners.