A Corpus-based Comparative Research On Formulaic Speech By Chinese And English University Students

Applying for transfer theory, the present study adopts corpus linguistic approach, explores the distribution, and analyzes formal features and pragmatic functions of formulaic speech (FS) used by Chinese English major students in spoken discourse. And it issues the comparative study of the usage of Formulaic speeches between Chinese English major learners and native speakers.SWECCL (Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners) and MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) are collected in the present study, as the data source. By the help of Antconc Tools and manual filtering procedure, all basically 3-6 formulaic speeches (FSes) are extracted from the two corpora. According to the criterion of Altenberg (1998), all of FSes can be divided into three kinds of categories: full clauses FS, clause constituents FS and incomplete phrases FS.The formal features and pragmatic functions of FS are firstly figured out in oral English test of Chinese English major students on the basis of SECCL (Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners). The present study shows that majority of FSes have the formal features, that is, regular forms, transparent semantic meaning and clear structures, etc. Also the study finds that there are different pragmatic functions in specific contexts such as informational function, evaluation function, situational function, moralizing function and organizing function.On the basis of statistics in the comparative analysis, formulaic speech is a generally appearing not only language output of learners but also that of native speakers. Wherever in SECCL or MICASE 3-words FSes always occupy the largest proportion, and there is the less the number of FS, at the same time, as the FS length increasing. Moreover, in both SECCL and MICASE, the three structures appear, and clause constituents FS come first in number in both corpora, followed by full clauses FS, while incomplete phrases FS the last.Compared with native speakers, there are more significant difference in longer and higher recurrent FSes. The usages of FS in spoken discourse by Chinese English major students are found to be far from satisfactory. Chinese learners always tend to underuse or overuse some formulaic speeches in their communication. The possible reasons that cause this deviation are misleading of traditional pedagogy, negative transfer of mother tongue or inertial thinking.