A Corpus-based Study Of Preposition In In DUT Learners' English Compositions

As a new research approach in applied linguistics, corpus approach is employed moreand more widely in language researches since the application of advanced computer and theemergence of enormous text corpus and well-designed concordance software. With acorpus-based contrastive Interlanguage Analysis and Error Analysis method, the present studyexplores the use situation of preposition in in DUT non-English major postgraduates'compositions, with a reference to the native speaker's Brown Corpus. In this paper, the usesof preposition in fall into 18 categories. Statistical data indicates that differences of the uses ofin between DUT learners and the native speakers are not significant on the whole, but DUTlearners commit some errors. A further study shows that DUT learners overuse the basic usesof in while underusing the others. This paper makes a tentative explanation and a tentativesuggestion for the English teaching.