A Corpus-based Study Of The Adverbial Using Features Of Chinese College English Learners

In the twentieth century, the corpus has been widely used to analyze interlanguage. Because adverbs play an important role in daily communications, especially in expressing speakers'attitudes, the thesis chooses adverbs as its studying subject. With the help of tools such as AntConc3.2.1w, BFSU Collocator1.0, PatternBuilder, etc, the study has employed the written English sub-corpus of British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus, and thoroughly examined the frequency, overusing, underusing and collocations of adverbs in the Written English sub-corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL 2.0) of Spoken and Written Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL 2.0). The researcher has also made discussion and analyzed the causes of the adverbial using features of Chinese college English learners.The adverbial using features of Chinese college English learners include the following aspects:First, Chinese college English learners have the tendency to use degree adverbs, wh-general adverbs and general adverbs in their writing. Those three types of adverbs make up 70% of the total top-20 most-frequently used adverbs.Second, comparing with native speakers' speaking and writing in BNC,80% of Chinese most-frequently used adverbs are under-used.85% of the top-20 least-frequently used adverbs of Chinese college English learners are also underused compared with the native speakers. With regard to the common collocations of top-5 frequently used adverbs of Chinese college English learners, like not, but, some, what, first, and same, the word variety and proficiency of their adverbial collocations with verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, their word variety and proficiency are much poorer and more tedious than native speakers.It was partly influenced by the native language negative transfer and incompetent mastery of adverbs, and partly affected by the sole argumentative type of writing of College English Test Band 4 and Band 6 and inadequate language input. The present research is valuable to provide some constructive suggestions for the lexical teaching, particularly adverbial teaching in China's college education.