A Corpus-based Study Of “There Be” Construction In Chinese Middle School Students' English Writing

As a unique and complicated structure in human language,the typical English existential structure “there be” construction is one of the most important research focuses in the study of language.Linguists from different schools,the traditional grammarians,scholars of Generative Grammar,scholars of Systemic-Functional Linguistics,and even the Cognitive linguists,are all concerned with it.Thanks to the establishment of interlanguage corpora such as “Chinese Learner English Corpus”(CLEC)and“Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners”(TECCL),it becomes possible to make the corpus-based study of characteristics of use and acquisition of the interlanguage of Chinese English learners.It's more convenient to make contrastive interlanguage analysis because of the free online corpora of English native speakers such as “British National Corpus”(BNC)and “Corpus of Contemporary American English”(COCA).It is helpful for middle school English teaching and learning if the characteristics and laws of the students' use of typical English existential structure “there be” can be found.With a mixed methodology of quantitative and qualitative research,this study applies the framework of corpus-based contrastive interlanguage analysis.Based on the two most influential English corpora of Chinese learners,CLEC and TECCL,this study makes an empirical investigation of the use of typical existential structure “there be” in Chinese English learners' writing with the help of the concordance tool BFSU Power Conc 1.0.A contrastive analysis with the native speaker's use of this structure in BNC and COCA is made in order to investigate and probe into the characteristics,changing tendency,and the differences with English native speakers' use.Two sub-corpora are built,CLEC_MSS(ST2 in CLEC)and TECCL_MSS(compositions of middle school students in TECCL),and the five types of “there be” are queried in this two sub-corpora respectively.Meanwhile,these five types are also queried in BNC and COCA.A diachronic comparison and contrast of the results is made between CLEC_MSS and TECCL_MSS.The same comparison and contrast is also made between the results in learners corpora and in native speakers' corpora.With the quantitative description of results and qualitative analysis of comparison and contrast,the characteristics are summarized.Based on the linguistic view of language transfer and cognitive linguistics,the researcher analyzed the typical inappropriate use of Chinese middle students' English writing.The following four research findings are found by the combination of the corpus-based contrastive interlanguage analysis and linguistic view of the theory of language transfer and cognitive linguistics:(1)Analysis of the use of “there be” construction in CLEC_MSS and TECCL_MSS shows that there is an unbalanced distribution and they are significantly different from the use of English native speakers' use as they are shown in BNC and COCA.(2)There is a unique characteristic in the use of “there be” construction by Chinese middle school students' English writing.In terms of the basic forms which express the basic meaning of existence,there is almost no difference between Chinese middle students and English native speakers.However,in terms of more complicated forms of this structure,the diverse use of Chinese middle students is far from English native speakers.Not a single instance of use of any form of “there + semi-auxiliary + be” and“there + marginal modal + be” is found in CLEC_MSS and TECCL_MSS.(3)The negative transfer from the Chinese syntactic structure containing the meaning of existence makes it typical of the type of error with the structure of “there +have / has + NP” in Chinese middle school students' English writing.A small number of instances of such structure are found in these two learner corpora of English.(4)There is no significant change in the use of “there be” construction between data providers of CLEC_MSS and TECCL_MSS.The former represents the English writingof middle school students of the mid-1990 s and the late 1990 s,while the latter represents the English writing of middle school students from 2010 to 2015.The only difference is that the use of different forms of “there be” structure is slightly diverse in TECCL_MSS.Thus we draw the conclusion that since the notion of existence is needed in all languages,the English interlanguage of Chinese middle school students can also express the basic meaning of existence even through the diversity and richness in learners' interlanguage are far from the ones in English native speakers' language.It is of great help when we fully understand the use and characteristics of “there be”construction in Chinese middle school students' English writing.In teaching practice,teachers may have clear aims and focus in their teaching of the existential “there be”structure.They may pay special attention to the use of modal verbs in this structure.Some more complicated forms of “there be” should be purposefully utilized in students' English writing so as to achieve diversity in language expression.