Chapter One Introduction
1.1 General Description of the Present Study
There are many researches about English prepositions in recent decades. Some scholarsstudy prepositions by corpus, reveal many valuable information.From the early 1960s，N.Francis and H.Kucera began to design and finished the firstgeneration of large-scale electronic corpus (the famous Brown Corpus) to now，CorpusLinguistics has experienced 40 years development. Domestic corpus linguistics research alsohas a period of nearly 20 years. The earliest dates back to the 20^^^ century, in the mid-1980s,the JD-EST，an academic English corpus which was established by Professor Huang Renjieand Professor Yang Huizhong of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Since then, the domesticcorpus linguistics has grown prosperously‘ In 2002，Chen Jiansheng made a research onpreposition at on the basis of Chinese EFL composition corpus. He found that, at is a highfrequency preposition for native speakers，but Chinese EFL don't use it very often; the usagesituation of at has not reached the teaching syllabus; Chinese EFUs vocabulary scope isnarrow. In 2006，Peng Yuan carried on a research about preposition errors in ChineseLearner English Corpus. The research result shows that, the most errors are prepositionselection errors; students have more difficulties in using m-phrases; the least errors areoveruse errors. Linguistics and computer experts work together, more and more scholars havemade empirical research from different levels with different purposes, thus promoting thedevelopment of domestic corpus linguistics.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
This thesis uses Parallel Corpus of Chinese EFL Leamers-Spoken, British NationalCorpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and AntConc software to countand classify the prepositions used by the college English Majors in the oral test of TEM8，makes a contrastive analysis of the preposition usage between native speakers and ChineseEnglish majors. The purpose of this thesis is to find out the following problems; firstly, whichis the most commonly used preposition that Chinese English Majors adopt in the oral test;Secondly, what is the condition of preposition misuse, overuse and underuse; thirdly, howmany types of preposition errors in the oral test; fourthly, how many factors that can causepreposition errors? With the purpose of solving these problems, the author chooses thisresearch topic.The word cluster number, frequency, word length, word meaning and complexity caninfluence students' speech accuracy and frequency. In this paper, similarities and differencesof preposition usage are contrasted between native speakers and Chinese English majors. Theauthor analyzes the counting statistics and summarizes the features and problems ofpreposition errors, and explains the differences of preposition usages between nativespeakers' corpus and Chinese learners’ corpus. Therefore, this thesis provides some methodsfor the Chinese English learners, provides a useful reference for English teaching, andprovides some inspiration for English test method.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Corpus Preposition Research Status
Corpus-based study is an approach to investigating language structure and use throughthe analysis of large databases of real language examples stored on computer. Issues amenableto corpus research include the meaning of words across registers, the distribution and functionof grammatical forms and categories, the investigation of lexico-grammatical associations(associations of specific words with particular grammatical constructions), the study ofdiscourse characteristics, register variation, and (when learner corpora are available) issues inlanguage acquisition and development. The research results are more accurate andconvincing on the basis of corpus.Preposition is one of the most active English vocabularies; it has been the difficulty ofour traditional teaching. Therefore, corpus-based preposition research has been a hot issue ofexperts and scholars in recent years.Chen Changyi concludes six common errors of Chinese English learners: omission,addition, and excessive use of English prepositions in the translation from Chinese to English,speech confusion, inappropriate analogy and wrong collation. In addition, according to theContrastive Analysis, Chen Changyi explores the reasons for these errors: mother tongueinterference and influence cause most of the errors and difficulties that Chinese Englishlearners make in the process of English learning and application. Chinese and English belongto two different language branches, so many differences exist in the pronunciation, grammarand vocabulary structure. Moreover, the culture differences between Anglo and Chinese Hannationality also exist, people's ideas and ways of thinking are totally different. Most of ourChinese English learners' language experience is Chinese. When they begin to leam English,they will consciously or unconsciously use Chinese language codes, grammar structure, evenforms of thinking and expression to influence their English learning. Therefore, errors aremade easily.
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2.2 English Preposition Research Status
Preposition, is a word or group of words, such as in，from, to，out of and on behalf of，used before a noun or pronoun to show place, position, time or method. It is a part of speechused before noun phrases or other structures that equal to noun phrases to show the4relationship between words. English does not have an advanced inflections, it effects the！ connection of words extensively. According to the statistics of the American famousI Linguistics Cuime, there are 286 prepositions in English, nine of them are often used: at, of，for, on, in, to, from, with and by, occupy 92% use ratio of prepositions. Therefore, besidesthose common propositions, some verb participles can also be used as prepositions. With theaddition of preposition phrases, such as regardless of, take on, the number of prepositions islarger. Chinese prepositions have so many differences with English prepositions; therefore,Chinese English learners have a huge challenge to leam English well.Preposition is an important part of speech in English vocabulary; some even say thatpreposition is the language of English. In the corpus of Brown and LOB, prepositions areaccounted for 12%. Kenndy estimates, in any English text, there will be one preposition inevery eight words. Among the approximately 100 prepositions, 38 are common, but 14 ofthem are often used. Those simple prepositions have become a great difficulty to ChineseEnglish learners. Some researcher thinks that the rich semantics and changeable usage are themain cause of English learners' difficulty. What's more, many preposition collocation alsoincrease the learner" memory burden. They have to figure out, whether care for or care aboutor some collocation else.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework......... 7
3.1 Error Analysis......... 7
3.2 Language Transfer......... 9
3.3 Interlanguage .........10
3.3.1 Origin of Interlanguage......... 10
3.3.2 Features of Interlanguage......... 12
Chapter Four Methodology......... 13
4.1 Research Subject......... 15
4.2 Research Tools .........18
4.3 Procedure of the Study .........20
Chapter Five Analysis and Discussion......... 22
5.1 Error Identification.........25
5.2 Explanations of Errors......... 31
Chapter Five Analysis and Discussion
5.1 Error Identification
In this paper, the frequency of the top ten prepositions in PACCEL-S is counted first theyare: to (6961)，o/(4849)，in (2881)，ybr (1292), on (716), with (539)，by (538), as(349) and about (309). The frequency of to ranks first which means that Chinese Englishmajors tend to use to most often in their spoken English. Then, the frequencies of those tenprepositions are counted in the reference corpora: COCA and BNC, the author made acomparison among those three corpora as Table 4.4 shows.However, preposition overuse and underuse could not be counted only by frequency ineach corpus. Therefore，we need the help of standard frequency. It is the frequency of oneword in 1 million words. Normally, researchers choose to use the standard frequency tofacilitate comparison among corpora. For example, we could say the standard frequency offlower in COCA is 19.97, which means that in 1 million English words that American use,there are 19.97 words oi flower. The Table 4.1 shows the standard frequency of the top tenprepositions in the three corpora. From the table, we can find that, the standard frequency of to(35705.7) is higher than COCA (27185.1) and BNC (23432.4). Therefore, it can be analyzedthat preposition to is overused in Chinese English major spoken English.
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Conclusion
The preposition usage feature in Chines English Majors" spoken English is one of theimportant projects in interlanguage research. The number, frequency, cluster length, structureand meaning complexity of prepositions may reveal the accuracy and fluency of ChineseEnglish majors' spoken English. Compared the preposition usage difference and similarity inPACCEL-S with the reference corpora and reference dictionaries, the preposition features ofChinese English majors can be summarized and concluded. What's more，by analyzing thetendency and features of preposition clusters that students use when they express differentmeanings, it can provide direct feedback and inspiration to oral English teaching andcontribute to adopt some teaching methods.#p#分页标题#e#
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Reference (omitted)
