A Corpus-based Study On Misuses Of English Verbs In College Students' English Writing From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

Conceptual transfer is a new notion which represents one of the latest trends in language transfer research field.It seeks to explain language transfer at the level of concepts.This research is conducted under the theoretical framework of Conceptual Transfer Hypothesis,aiming at studying misuses verb in college students' English writing and answers the following two questions:(1)What kinds of misuses of verb occur in college students' writing from the perspective of conceptual transfer,and which kinds of errors are in higher frequency?(2)What are the possible causes of these misuses? This research chooses the sub-corpora ST3 and ST4 in CLEC as research subjects and BNC Corpus is used as the auxiliary analysis tool.Besides,AntConc is utilized to extract and analyze materials.Meanwhile,different kinds of misuses of verb and possible causes that lead to this phenomenon are explored on the basis of the conceptual transfer(L1-based concept,L2-based concept and shared concept).The study finds: Firstly,based on the conceptual transfer,there are 3 types of misuses of verb: “L1-based concepts” errors,“L2-based concepts” errors and “shared concepts” errors.During all these three kinds of misuses,the “shared concept” error is the most frequent one but the “L2-based concept” error is the most complex one.Secondly,the possible causes of misuse of verbs are the interlingual factor,intralingual factor and communication strategy.