A Corpus-based Study Of The Use Of S-genitive And Of-genitive In Chinese College EFL Learners' Compositions

Due to lack of definite boundaries between s-genitive and of-genitive, EFL learners are inclined to be confused using the genitive structures. However, the author found very limited literature about EFL learners'acquisition of genitive.As a new research approach in applied linguistics, corpus approach has been employed more and more widely in language researches with the popularity of personal computers and the emergence of enormous text corpora and well-designed concordance software.Considering that corpora have inarguable advantages in conducting a quantitative investigation on one grammatical pattern, this thesis adopts a corpus linguistic approach. The researcher has conducted a quantitative study of Chinese college EFL learners'utilization of s-genitive and of-genitive in compositions from perspective of grammar. This thesis is aimed at revealing the distribution and characteristics of s-genitive and of-genitive utilized by Chinese EFL learners in compositions by investigating the data taken from two sub-corpora (ST3 and ST4) of Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). Two thousand four hundred and fifty-two compositions were collected in the research, in which all s-genitives and of-genitives were classified in concordance with the help of WordSmith. The results indicate that Chinese learners show many characteristics in using genitive in compositions:(1) The frequency of of-genitives is much higher than that of s-genitives;(2) The distribution of s-genitives and of-genitives in ST3 and ST4 is influenced by grammatical function of N1, type of N1, the meanings expressed by the relation between N1 and N2, and complexity of N1/N2;(3) Among the discussed four factors, the one of type of N1 sets a most obvious and severe constraint on the choice of s-genitive and of-genitive; (4) The constraints of semantic and syntactic seem much weaker in Chinese college EFL learners'compositions.The misuses of s-genitive and of-genitive are also analyzed. Based on the results of the questionnaires and relevant theories in the field of SLA, it is found that overgeneralization of the grammatical rules and sub-consciousness of semantic and restrictions of s-genitive and of-genitive are the main reasons for Chinese EFL learners'errors in compositions.It is expected that this research will gain some insights into domestic EFL teaching and learning.