Analysis Of Compound Using By Senior English Majors In China

Compounding is an important aspect in lexical acquisition and language teaching. English makes rich use of word compounding. Compounds are capable of condensing large messages in few words by fusing two items into just one lexical unit. This is a highly productive resource, the most powerful word building process (Hatch and Brown 1995). and a frequent source of neologisms (new words). The complexity of compounds lies in their remarkable flexibility, which allows for the free creation of new combinations out of two existing words. We may combine any two lexical words in any order to bring about a new term to satisfy our contextual needs better than any single word available in English lexicon. Such ease in vocabulary building has triggered a growing tendency to create 'on-the-spot' composites. Their occurrence is becoming more and more common, especially in written mode, such as newspapers, magazines etc. However, despite their high frequency in everyday and specialized writing, ELT has paid little attention to this phenomenon. Teachers only account for those the students come across, but do not normally try to cultivate their compounding awareness and always fail to help them develop the ability to understand Make-up Compounds (MUCs) (Paula Jullian) in a systematic way.This thesis aims to discover the distributive regularity of compounds in CLEC and CBL (CNN, BNC, LOBA), which represent Chinese style of using compounds in English and English compounding using style itself respectively. Results show that compounds especially MUCs are used and created in a remarkable frequency in English, while Chinese learners, even the advanced ones use most frequently those compounds that often appeared in their high school English books. By making comparison and contrast between these corpora and through error analysis and percentage analysis, the distribution of compounds and the main characteristics of these compounds were summed up especially the Chinese students' compounding using characteristics. The research shows that there exists great significance not only in numbers but also invarieties in total compound using (also in noun compound using and adjective compound using) between these two corpora. Chinese language itself has a wide use of compounds. So it is practical and rewarding to probe into finding an efficient way to understand and use compounds for Chinese students in learning English. In addition, the Decode-Encode strategy introduced in the paper is quite beneficial when used reasonably. All these would provide teachers with useful and valuable information.Different from traditional methods, the research is conducted mainly on the basis of statistical theories and by means of statistical methods. The use of quite a few computer programs facilitates the study and assures the reliability.