The Production Of Attitudinal Formulaic Sequences Of Chinese English Learners

Formulaic sequence is a continuous or discontinuous sequence of words or other elements,which is prefabricated,that is,stored and retrieved as a whole,rather than generated or analyzed by the language grammar.Linguists have already realized that there is formulaic nature in language use.Besides,flexible and accurate use of formulaic sequence not only plays an important part in native speakers' language competence,but also remains a difficult point for Chinese English learners.In addition,it is a significant factor leading to the obvious difference between Chinese English learners and their L1 counterparts in their language performance.This thesis mainly investigates a subcategory of stance formulaic sequence,namely attitudinal formulaic sequence.A contrastive corpus method is adopted in this thesis to investigate features of Chinese learners' production and development of attitudinal formulas.Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(WECCL)is selected and British Academic Written English Corpus(BAWE)is taken as the reference corpus.In this thesis,the operational definition and classification of attitudinal formulaic sequence refer to the classification framework of stance formulaic sequence by Biber,et al.(2004),and the classification standard of academic formulas by Simpson-Vlach and Ellis(2010).Accordingly,attitudinal formulaic sequence is divided into four subcategories,namely obligation and directive,ability and possibility,intention / volition and evaluation.Target formulaic sequences are chosen from the academic formulas list created by Simpson-Vlach and Ellis(2010).The specific research questions are as follows:(1)What is the feature of Chinese English learners' production of attitudinal formulaic sequences?(2)What is the developmental tendency of Chinese English learners' use of attitudinal formulaic sequence?The results from the data analysis show that:(1)in terms of production,the total number of attitudinal formulaic sequences used by Chinese English learners is significantly smaller than that by native English speakers;as for the subcategories,the situation varies from one to another.Specifically,the frequency of obligation and directive and ability and possibility formulas used by Chinese English learners is significantly lower than that of native English speakers,while the frequency of the other two subcategories,namely intention / volition and evaluation formulas,is significantly higher than that of native English speakers;(2)in terms of development,with the improvement of their English proficiency,the overall frequency of attitudinal formulaic sequences used by Chinese learners shows a downward trend,but the development tendencies of the four subcategories are not consistent.Specifically,the development trend of evaluation formulas is similar to the overall tendency of attitudinal formulas,both showing a significant declining trend.However,the development tendencies of attitudinal formulas in the other three subcategories vary from each other.The results above generally reveal Chinese English learners' underuse of attitudinal formulaic sequences,and their imbalance in their use of attitudinal formulas in each subcategory.Specifically,Chinese English learners underuse the two subcategories of obligation and directive and ability and possibility formulas,overuse intention / volition formulas,while the use of evaluation formulas gradually transfers from overuse to normal frequency.Moreover,the phenomenon of their misuse of attitudinal formulaic sequences also exists.Finally,Chinese learners' overuse,underuse and misuse of attitudinal formulaic sequences may result from their imbalance of the dual-mode language system in their mental lexicon.The investigation towards the attitudinal formulas corpora could,on one hand,shed light on the feature and development of Chinese English learners' use of attitudinal formulaic sequences,on the other hand,provide some pedagogical implications and references for the teaching of academic English writing.