A Corpus-based Study Of Verb Pattern Errors By Chinese College Students

Verb usage learning has always been difficult for Chinese learners because of its complexity and diversity in use. Many researches have been done about verb errors such as agreement and tense, yet few are done about verb pattern errors in spite of the fact that according to Chinese Learner's English Corpus (CLEC) research, verb pattern errors take up 2.32% of all kinds of learners'errors and rank the third in errors about verbs occurring in Chinese EFL learning process. This shows that verb pattern remains difficult for Chinese learners and demands a thorough research.This thesis adopts the corpus-driven method and the error analysis theory to launch a study about verb pattern usage by Chinese college learners and aims at finding out the features of verb pattern usage and providing several suggestions for verb pattern teaching in China. All the written output data involved in this paper are from four sub-corpora of CLEC (ST3, ST4, ST5 and ST6). After retrieving all the verb pattern errors in the four sub-corpora with text retrieval tools--My Finder, errors are re-categorized into three categories (error of intransitive verbs taking an object, transitive verb used in intransitive ways and grammatical irregularity) and 21 sub-categories according to the suggested criteria of CLEC and A. S. Hornby's classification of verb patterns. And this thesis combines both quantitative techniques and multi-level qualitative analysis and attempt to address the following questions:1. What are the features of the errors on verb pattern made by Chinese EFL learners?2. What are the sources of the verb pattern errors?3. Is there relevance between the grade levels of Chinese EFL learners and the frequency of these errors?Major findings are listed as follows:1. Within the sub-corpora, higher grade level students make more verb pattern errors than lower grade level learners and this applies to both comparison groups of ST3/ST4, and ST5/ST6.2. Grammatical irregularity is the most frequently occurring errors and with the proficiency level rising, the grammatical irregularity errors take up a larger proportion for both non-English major students and English major students.3. The distributions of specific types of verb pattern errors in ST3 and ST4 are very similar; and this also applies to ST5 and ST6. Besides confusion of transitive verbs with intransitive verbs, the problems with verb patterns mainly focus on misuse of adjuncts because of abuse or omission of preposition, the omission of direct objects; semantic mis-collocation between subject and verb, and the misuse of object and object complement in the form of non-finite clause.4. The main reasons for verb pattern errors are the interference of L1, intra-lingual factors such as overgeneralization, false analogy, overlooking co-occurrence restrictions and blending, and pedagogical factors.The data analysis results together with the discussions provide us with some implications for English verb pattern teaching in China. Corpus analysis and error analysis are both considered helpful for verb pattern learning; teaching and learning verb pattern can be facilitated by comparing target language structure with the native language and learners should choose the right dictionaries and learn how to use them.