A Corpus-Based Study On Chinese English Majors' Errors Of Three Types Of English Clauses

A clause is the basic grammatical structure of English. Delahunty and Garvey (1994: 207) state that"clauses are basic for several reasons. First, you need only one of them to make a sentence. Second, in actual communication, shorter utterances are usually reconstructed and understood by reference to clauses". English learners' mastery of English clauses to some extent reflects their mastery of the language. This thesis aims to throw some light on Chinese senior English majors'mastery of English clauses by analyzing errors of object clauses, errors of adverbial clauses and errors of relative clauses found in the Chinese-English translation works of Test for English Majors Grade Eight (TEM-8) collected by Corpus for English Majors (CEM). The translation section of the corpus is chosen as the database for this thesis, because various clause errors in the translation works collected by the corpus have been tagged, and more importantly, examining the errors in the translation works of a certain article by a group of people is one of the best ways to discover the most common difficulties the group might encounter. The analysis reveals that we shouldn't be too optimistic about senior English majors'mastery of English clauses. They still have a lot of trouble with English object clauses, adverbial clauses and relative clauses. Among some of the major errors in their production of these clauses are the wrong order of the object clause, the inappropriate reduction of the adverbial clause, and the random relative pronoun omission of the relative clause. In addition, literal translation is evident in the production of all these three types of clauses. Based on the analysis of the errors found, the sources of the errors including inter-lingual and intra-lingual factors are sought after. It is found that negative L1 transfer and over-generalization play a great role in the production of those clause errors. Accordingly, the pedagogical implications are presented. First, authentic language input should be increased. Secondly, learner corpora could be made good use of to enable English majors to notice errors committed by other English learners and thus avoid them. Lastly, the awareness towards differences between Chinese and English should be better raised to reduce the negative mother tongue influence.