| As the basic element for conveying meanings, words have been a focus for both language learners and researchers. In English language, verbs are not only playing an extremely important part in expressing meanings as they do in all the other languages, but also bringing possibilities of expressiveness and diversity in language use because of the feature that verbs have a variety of meanings and collocations and can be applied to diverse sentence patterns. However, the feature produces difficulties and troubles in language learning as well because it’s not easy to acquire a comprehensive knowledge for all the usages, and the story is especially true for high-frequency verbs. So this dissertation chooses high-frequency verbs Find as the target to explore and analyze the tendencies and characteristics for the sentence structural use of Find by Chinese college students.Based on the47classifications for all English sentences by Professor Zhang Daozhen, this dissertation employs a division of three main sentence patterns and fourteen sub-patterns for Find accordingly with the help of dictionaries and grammar books. A corpus-based approach and the log likelihood ratio calculator are also employed to analyze and process the data collected from the observed corpus CLEC and the referent corpus LOCNESS. In this way, Chinese students’general features and their differences of using Find at their different proficiency levels are discussed. The conclusions can be summarized as follows:1) Chinese college students tend to use this high-frequency verb more frequently than native speakers do, and they have very obvious preferences in applying the target verb to its sentence patterns. The "FIND+O" pattern is overused while "FIND+O+OC" is insufficiently adopted. The tendency of employing the "FIND+O+OC" insufficiently is eased as students’ level of proficiency improves while no significant differences can be found in adopting the "FIND+IO+DO" pattern.As for the fourteen sub-patterns, the same tendencies and features of using the main patterns they belong to could not always be found. Students tend to particularly like using one or two of the sub-patterns while underusing and even neglect other sub-patterns directly. In terms of the specific use of the patterns by students at different proficiency levels,"FIND+O" is the most frequently used one and its sub-pattern "FTND+that+CL" is overused by Chinese college students of all proficiency levels in their writings, which is a direct evidence for ceasing to advance to some degree in acquiring sentence patterns of Find by Chinese college students. To sum up, Chinese college students tend to apply Find to its sentence patterns in a less balanced manner.2) When comparing the data and errors collected from writings at different levels of proficiency, it can be seen that Chinese students are doing better in language accuracy as their levels of proficiency increase. They also have more comprehensive and balanced applications of patterns for Find when they reach higher grades. The English majors generally do a better job in language accuracy than non-English majors do, and the writings in ST3show the largest number of misemployments and most obvious preferences in applying Find to certain patterns. Writings in ST4indicates a slight advantage in using patterns of Find compared with writings in ST5, but errors committed outnumber those committed in ST5in both types and quantity. The English majors of senior years show the closest competence of mastering all the structures like native speakers do with fewest errors.The research is a tentative study on the use of sentence patterns for Find by Chinese college students. The descriptions and explanations for students’specific language behaviors are given so as to put forward some suggestions for reference in language learning and instructions. Hopefully, the findings would be inspirational and helpful in learning and teaching of structural use of Find and other high-frequency verbs in English. |
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