A Comparative Study Of Chinese Preposition “在” And The Relevant Prepositions In Thai

Preposition is a kind of structural word, which is an important grammatical term in both Chinese and Thai. The prepositions in Chinese and Thai have many similar features but also different ones. Thus, these different features, for the Thai students studying Chinese, become the difficult points. Based on the data gathered by the writer, there have been many people, nowadays, making the comparison study relating to the prepositions in Chinese and Thai and certain research findings have been gained. However, these studies mainly focus on the comparison of some prepositions that are easy to be confused and usually a few limited prepositions expressing object semanteme and time semanteme but very little attention paid to the comparison between Chinese preposition“在”and the relevant prepositions in Thai. As a matter of fact, there are some unsolved questions in this aspect, such as, how many Thai prepositions are relevant with the preposition“在”;compared its semantic functions and grammatical functions with the preposition“在”,are there many similarities and differences? Therefore, the writer thinks that it is necessary to make a comparison between the preposition“在”and the relevant prepositions in Thai.The writer divides the whole paper into four chapters:The first chapter is introduction. This chapter mainly makes an introduction about the reasons and significance of choosing this topic, relevant literature reviews, research objectives and research scope and methods.The second chapter is about the comparison of Chinese and Thai. In this chapter, firstly, the writer analyzes the use conditions in different semantic cases of Chinese preposition“在”and relevant prepositions in Thai by six different semantic ways. Then, make a contrastive analysis on the question of grammatical functions and grammatical position to find out the similarities and differences. Through the research, we find out that the semantic functions in the twenty-six prepositions in Thai relating to the“在”are a little simple. Chinese preposition“在”has six different meanings while in the relevant Thai prepositions, there are only five meanings in the preposition that has the most complicated semantic function. Moreover, prepositional phrase in Chinese can act as adverbial, attribute, complement, predicate and parenthesis in the sentence while the prepositions in the Thai can only be adverbial, attribute and parenthesis. When the Chinese prepositional phrases work as adverbial, it can be in the beginning and middle of the sentence but not in the end of the sentence while the Thai prepositional phrases acting as adverbial can be in the beginning and the end of the sentence but not in the middle. When Chinese prepositional phrases act as attribute, it is in the front of the central word while Thai is behind the central word. When the Chinese and Thai prepositional phases work as parenthesis, their position is the same, in other words, it can be in the beginning, middle and end of the sentences.The third chapter is the error analysis. In this chapter, the writer firstly reveals the errors when Thai students use the Chinese preposition "在" based on the written materials collected and questionnaires. Then, with the help of contrastive analysis theory, find out the causes of the errors. Finally, give some relevant teaching suggestions in allusion to the errors of Thai students. Through the research, we find that the main errors, when Thai students use the Chinese preposition“在”,include word order errors, mistaken addition of words, omission errors, mistaken replacement errors and mistaken use errors among which the word order errors are the most while the mistaken use errors are the least. In addition, we also find that when Thai students use the Chinese preposition“在”,the main causes of the errors are negative transfer of native language, negative transfer of the target language and the complexity of the target language.The fourth chapter is the conclusion. This chapter summarizes the contents of the whole passage.