A Contrastive Analysis Of The Use Of Verb Keep

The present thesis is a corpus-based research focusing on the high-frequency verb keep used by Chinese non-English majors and native speakers.Interlanguage theory, contrastive analysis theory and error analysis theory are adopted in the thesis.The corpora involved in the thesis are Brown which stands for native speakers,St3 and St4 in CLEC which stand for Chinese non-English majors.The thesis investigates commonly used keep senses,keep phrasal verbs,idioms and collocations by Chinese learners in comparison with those by native speakers.What's more,the errors committed by Chinese non-English majors are also analyzed in the present research.In addition,the research aims to confirm whether Chinese learners' performance on verb keep gets better with the improvement of their English proficiency.The results of the study show that Chinese non-English majors do not have a good command of the frequently used senses of keep by native speakers.There exists overuse and underuse of some senses.In comparison with native speakers' profound use of keep phrasal verbs,idioms and collocations,Chinese non-English majors' employment of them are poor and they only focus on a limited number of them.As for the errors on keep committed by Chinese non-English majors,the main causes for the incorrect use are mother tongue interference,overgeneralization and ignorance of rule restrictions. Based on the above investigation,some tentative suggestions for improvement on English teaching and learning are also provided.