| The present thesis is a descriptive study about the sequence of tenses in complex sentence with object clause by Chinese English as second language learners, with the aim of making an identification, analysis and summary of the sequence of tenses. The data are selected from five sub-corpora in Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC).They are ST2(middle school students), ST3(CET4 students), ST4(CET 6 students), ST5(English--major juniors), ST6(English--major seniors) respectively. The text-retrieval software Antconc3.2.1 is taken as research tool and Origin8.6 version is a drawing, data analysis tool, combining quantitative method with qualitative method, which is devoted to making a comparative analysis of proper and improper usage of the sequence of tenses in five sub-corpora. This paper tries to answer the following two questions:(1) What are the major tenses in main clause? Then what about the characteristics of the sequence of tenses with object clause?(2) Does it display a balanced development as the English proficiency improves?The cognitive reference point under the cognitive linguistics framework, time model referred by Reichenbach and time representation in English are taken as the theoretical foundations of this research. According to China’s current English teaching situation, those 16 kinds of tenses provided by Bo Bing are adopted as the classification basis of data analysis. The results show that:(1)The tenses in main clause are dominated by the simple present tense and the simple past tense, which takes up 88.6%.The frequency of other tenses is too low to reach a valid result.(2)From a longitudinal view, when the tense in main clause is the simple present tense and it is right, the proper usage made by ST3,ST4,ST5 and ST6 are all better than ST2; when the tense in main clause is the simple past tense and it is right, the changes in the magnitude of proper and improper usage which were made by five groups are almost the same.(3)From a cross-sectional view, when the tense in main clause is the simple present tense and it is right, the tenses used in subordinate clause are as followings: the simple present tense(68.9%)>the simple past tense(11.3%)>the simple future tense(10.8%)>the present perfect tense(3.5%)>the present continuous tense(1.7%)>the past future tense(1.3%); when the tense in main clause is the simple past tense and it is right, the tenses used in subordinate clause are as followings: the simple past tense(55%)>the simple present tense(18%)>the past perfect tense(9.1%)>the past future tense(6.7%)>the past continuous tense(1.9%).(4)When the tense in main clause is wrong, which includes tense choice errors and tense form errors. Generally speaking, the Chinese ESL learners have a higher tense form error frequency than tense choice error. Among them,the tense form error frequency is as followings:vp3(subject-verb agreement errors)(40%)>fm1(spelling errors)(27.7%)>vp9(modal verb errors)(4.1%)> fm2(morphological errors)(3.1%);the tense choice error frequency is as followings: the simple past tense and the simple present tense(15.9%)>the simple present tense and the present perfect tense(0.9%).(5)The senior students don’t have a better command of the sequence of tenses with their longer studies and higher language proficiency. Finally, this research puts forward some measures to reduce the errors of the sequence of tenses so as to present some inspiring ideas for the tense teaching in object clauses.In this way, the tense obstacles can be better overcome by learners. |
