The Use Of To-Infinitives In English Writing By Chinese College Students

Grammar is one of the most important branches of linguistics, and human who use language to communicate all obey the rules naturally and unconsciously. Infinitives, one of the typical English language constructions, together with gerunds and participles are usually taken as clausal structure. The infinitive is a form of a verb that has no inflection to indicate person, number, tense or mood. There are two types of infinitives:one with to, and a bare one. In this paper, the to-infinitives which is widely used in the college students’writings is focused on. According to Professor Zhang Daozhen’s (2002) classification of the to-infinitives’grammatical functions, a range of grammatical roles of this construction can be applied to be:subject, object, attribute, adverbial, predicative and a part of compound object and compound predicate.This paper employs a corpus-based approach, and chooses the corpora CLEC and LOCNESS, in which one is an observed corpus and the other is a reference corpus. In such a way, the general features of Chinese college students in using to-infinitives are revealed completely and comprehensively. The differences of using this construction by students belonging to different proficiency levels are studied.Conclusions can be summarized as follows:Generally, it is found that to-infinitives is considerably underused by Chinese college students in comparison with native students, and the difference is significant. When classifying this construction into seven grammatical categories, namely subject, object, attribute, adverbial, predicative and a part of compound object and compound predicate, we can easily find that each grammatical category of this construction is underused by Chinese college students in English writings except the "subject" and "adverbial" groups. Looking at the distribution figure, we can find that each category of the data in CLEC takes its proportion in the total amount less evenly when compared with reference corpus LOCNESS.When we compare the data collected according to different proficiency levels, broadly speaking, it can be found that Chinese college students use to-infinitive differently as their proficiency level differs. But it is out of expectation that the statistics of ST5is smaller than ST4thought it is a higher level. After to-infinitives are classified according to seven grammatical categories, statistics of each category in four sub-corpora separately tends to show a rising trend catching up with the figure of native students, which indicates a fact that the higher the proficiency it is, the closer it will approach to the native students’ level. One special case is that students in ST4overuse to-infinitives as object to a great extent. The figure is not only larger than those of the other3groups in CLEC, but also larger than native students’. Another is that the most evenly figure among4groups is the adverbial category.This research is just a tentative study on the use of to-infinitives by Chinese college students. It describes and explains Chinese students’ respective linguistic behavior, so as to provide some useful suggestions for references in foreign language instructions. And it is hoped that the major findings will be of great significance in the teaching and learning of to-V construction.