| This study conducted stratified sampling on a self-built Chinese EFL learners’ dependency treebank which was constructed under the theoretical framework of dependency grammar.This study sampled 150 time-limited English narrative compositions at eight grades as linguistic samples.To+X syntactic structures were extracted from the sampled compositions and categorized into two categories and 11 subcategories according to their syntactic functions and dependency relations in the sentences,in order to calculate the frequency of different to+X collocations and the mutual information(MI)scores between to and X words.This study also quantitatively explored the probability distribution of dependency relations between to and X words by applying the Probabilistic Valency Pattern theory,and thus reflects students’ language acquisition of to+X collocations at different proficiency levels.Furthermore,this study calculated the mutual information(MI)scores between to and X words of to+X collocations to quantitatively analyze the relationship between the association strength and Chinese EFL learners’ language proficiency.The use of specific target language structures can reflect learners’ mastery of the target language to some extent.In English,to+X collocations are widely used and have rich forms and usage.English particle to can be used as a preposition or a part of to-infinitive.To+X collocations can function as predicative,adverbial,object complement or postmodifier in a sentence.In China,to+X collocations were arranged into the national English curriculum as key curriculum input,such as the usage and meaning of to-infinitives,the syntactic function of the preposition to and a number of sentence patterns containing to+X structures.Meanwhile,the to+X collocations containing to as a preposition and the to+X collocations in the form of a to-infinitive both appeared frequently in this treebank and showed different features due to students’ different learning stages or English proficiency levels.The actual use of to+X collocations in this self-built dependency treebank showed that the development of the to+X collocations written by Chinese EFL learners in their English compositions has a potential relationship with learners’ language proficiency to a certain extent.Therefore,this study can help English learners understand the internal mechanism of to+X collocations and master their usage by exploring the to+X structures.This study can also help English teachers implement targeted teaching activities on this structure and clarify this structure as one of the language proficiency indicators in the process of second language acquisition.The major findings are: 1)The general frequency of to+X collocations in students’ English writings increases along with their grades,which shows the evident influence of language input from English textbooks and teaching activities.2)Two kinds of to+X collocations(to plays different roles in collocations labeled as prept1 and prept2)show completely opposite trends.The proportion of prept1 to+X collocations(to functions as a preposition in prept1 to+X collocations)decreases as students enter a higher degree of English proficiency,while the proportion of prept2to+X collocations(to functions as a part of a to-infinitive in prept2 to+X collocations)increases.The improvement of students’ English proficiency has affected their use of different types of to+X collocations.3)The to+X collocations labeled as prept1 frequently function as adverbials in different sentences(prept1:adv),while the to+X collocations labeled as prept2 frequently function as objects(prept2:obj).Due to the Principle of Least Effort adopted by language learners and other factors,the frequencies of the two types of to+X collocations change greatly.4)When students at different proficiency levels(level 1,2 and 3)use 11 subcategories of to+X collocations that perform various syntactic functions in sentences,the probability distributions of dependency relations between to and X words at three proficiency levels show diversified features and characteristics.5)The association strength of to+X collocations used by students at different proficiency levels varies greatly.Junior high school students’ English compositions have the strongest association strength of to+X collocations labeled as prept1 among L2 writings of three proficiency levels(level 1>level 2>level 3).College students show the relatively largest association strength of to+X collocations marked as prept2,followed by the senior high school students(level 3>level 2>level 1).Meanwhile,because the interlanguage fossilization appeared from level 2 to level 3,a stagnation of frequency and association strength of to+X collocations proves to be reasonable.6)The syntactic structure input from English textbooks has a considerable impact on students’ language output in English compositions.In sum,two kinds and 11 subcategories of to+X collocations in students’ English compositions show vivid developmental trends and the change of association strength between to and X in different to+X collocations indicates the occurrence of the interlanguage fossilization in the process of second language acquisition.These findings would shed light on the future studies on to+X collocations and offer some inspirations for second language acquisition and second language teaching.The findings would be conductive to Chinese EFL learners’ language acquisition of syntactic structures and educators’ understanding of features and process of learners’ language acquisition.This study further explored the to+X syntactic structure and provided a novel perspective and reference for future studies on the language acquisition of specific syntactic structures. |
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