A Corpus-based Study On Lexical Chunks In College English Writing

As one of the language units, lexical chunks can combine semantics meanings andfunctions as one. During the previous researches, there are basically two research methodsused on the studying of lexical chunks: theory-oriented research and corpus-oriented research.As many linguists agreed, although the theory-oriented research methods can provideadequate theoretical support for the study of lexical chunks, corpus-oriented method can givea better data support for the study; at the same time, compared with theory-oriented research,the corpus-oriented research focus on the authentic using conditions of lexical chunks, socompared with theory-oriented research, it has more practical significance. In the presentstudy, the author found the previous corpus-based lexical chunks studies would like to choosea native corpus as a reference to extract the most useful chunks from them, and then use thesechunks to value the using of lexical chunks of Chinese college students. Because lexicalchunks are related to certain content, it is hard to find the same topic in Chinese collegestudents’ writing from the native corpus. Therefore, instead of looking for external corpus asa reference on lexical chunks researching, the author conducts a self-built corpus and uses theinternal lexical chunks as a reference to examine the relevance between the use of lexicalchunks and pragmatic level.In the first place, the author collects200compositions from Lanzhou JiaotongUniversity and classifies them into two groups according to the scores of the writing: the50high proficiency level and150middle or low proficiency level. And then, the softwareAntConc3.2.0is used as a tool to extract the3-6word-length lexical chunks from the highproficiency level writings, and then after the process of manual filtering, the author finallygets the effective lexical chunks and their frequency; in the second place, by using AntConc,the author put these lexical chunks extracted from the high proficiency level writings into theother150writings to get their occurrence frequency; in the third place, SPSS13.0isemployed to get the correlation analysis between the use of lexical chunks and the pragmaticlevel, during this Chi-square test process, the scores of the students is regarded as dependentvariable and the frequency of the lexical chunks is regarded as independent variable; at last,the result indicates that there is a significant relevance between the using of lexical chunksand the scores of the writings.Further more, in order to conduct a contrastive study on the chunk-using between theChinese and English native college students, firstly, the author makes a self-built corpusbased on200Chinese college students’ writings and takes native corpus LOCNESS as areference, and then the author extracts3-6word-length chunks in two corpus with the help ofAntConc13.0. It is still necessary to do a manual filtering to get the effective lexical chunksand their frequency. Secondly, following Altenberg’ criterion (1998), there are threecategories of lexical chunks: full clauses, clause constituents and incomplete phrases; finally, the author makes a comprehensive analysis and comparison of the structural characteristicsand pragmatic functions of each category in two corpus, in addition, the Chi-Square test isemployed to conducted whether there exist significant differences of the occurrencefrequency on lexical chunks in two corpus.The analysis demonstrates that the self-built corpus and LOCNESS share with somesimilarity on the chunk-using: in both corpora, as a common language phenomenon, there area large number of lexical chunks, regarding the different word-length of lexical chunks; thelargest proportion goes to the three-word chunks. And with the length of the chunksincreasing, the total number of the chunks is decreasing. It has also been found out thatamong the three structural categories, clausal constituents occupy the largest proportion,followed by incomplete phrases; while complete clausal chunks the last. As for the functionaspect, in self-built corpus, Chinese learners nearly can use all of the functions the same asthe native speakers in their writings. Some of the most salient functions are informationalfunction, emotional function, remarking function, moralizing function and organizingfunction. While based on the research of Alterberg(1998), the author puts forward extra4pragmatic function for the single clause constituents, including the reason expressions, resultexpressions, conditional expressions and concessive expressionsHowever, compared with the use of lexical chunks in LOCNESS, the actual usingconditions of chunks by these Chinese learners are far away from satisfactory. Chinesecollege students prefer using colloquial and simple expressions in the English writings;meanwhile, some lexical chunks are overused and some are underused in their writings. Theunderlying factors for these deviations might be negative transfer of mother tongue, whichmakes Chinese college students like using the chunks which have equivalent meaning both inChinese and English. As a result, there are some vagueness and interlanguage fossilization intheir using of lexical chunks. In addition, on the function of quotation in full clauses, it isobviously that Chinese college students seldom use some cultural related chunks, which canreflect that there is a lacking of cultural consciousness in their acquisition of lexical chunks.Based on the findings concerning Chinese non-English major learners’ use of the chunks,the present study proposes s series of suggestions on English studying and learning and hopesthat they can be useful for Chinese students.