| Preposition,as an active functional word,has strong collocational ability and high frequency of use,and its use can reflect English learners’ language ability(Ma Dongmei & Shang Yan,2011).The word IN as a high frequency preposition,which is the second highest frequently used preposition in many corpora,like WECCL,LOCNESS,or BROWN,etc.,is an important factor to measure the English level of Chinese English as foreign language learners.Meanwhile,because of the universality of the use of IN,the study of its use provides instructive help to English preposition teaching and learning.Based on lexical priming theory(Hoey,2005),the present research uses WECCL as the research corpus,uses LOCNESS as the reference corpus,and uses Ant Conc,BFSU Collocator 1.0,etc.as the retrieval software,in order to analyze the use of IN by Chinese college English as foreign language learners.This research analyzes the high-frequency uses of IN by Chinese College English as foreign languages learners(Chinese college EFL learners)through keyword concordances,wildcards concordances,and regular expression concordances on the level of priming from three aspects: lexical collocation,colligation,and semantic association.The research questions of this study are as follow:(1)What are the distributional features of IN used by Chinese college EFL learners?(2)What are typical priming features of IN used by Chinese college EFL learners?(3)What are deviations in priming features of IN used by Chinese college EFL learners?This research found that,first of all,on the level of distributional features,the percentage of preposition IN used by Chinese college EFL learners is more than 94%,while the percentage of adverb IN is 3%,which is similar to the use of IN by native learners.Secondly,as for typical priming features of IN used by Chinese college EFL learners,on the collocational level,Chinese college EFL learners tend to prime nouns and verbs to IN.On the level of colligation,Chinese college EFL learners tend to use the preposition IN + DET + N,accounting for more than 50% of the total,and they tend to use preposition IN to start a sentence.Chinese college EFL learners tend to prime IT and indefinite pronoun ONE,and avoid priming reflexive pronoun ITSELF.On the level of semantic association,Chinese college EFL learners tend to connect an area or a space nouns with collective or public concepts when priming closer to deictic centers like IN+MY/OUR/THIS patterns.Besides,a typical feature of the use of IN by Chinese college EFL learners is the use of nesting phrases.Through the result of concordance,the research finds that nesting phrases like n fact,in conclusion,in that,in this/that case,in a word,in a way,in my opinion,in a sense,in a mess,take part in,do well in,in addition,in vain,in short,in public,in brief,in general,in particular appear in high frequency.Thirdly,on the level of deviations in priming features,Chinese college EFL learners tend to prime THE FUTURE rather than THE PAST when they use IN+THE+ “a period of time” patterns.As for V+IN patterns,about 70% of the examples show that Chinese college EFL learners use the infinitive form and base form after adverb IN,and they significantly avoid priming past tense and past participle of lexical verbs.In the form of lexical verb+IN,Chinese college EFL learners tend to link the concept of stative verbs rather than dynamic ones,which is significantly different from native learners.In the use of nesting phrases,part of Chinese college EFL learners’ uses are different from native learners’ use.For instance,as for the phrase in that case,native learners use CASE as center word rather than a nesting phrase.Chinese college EFL learners also made some mistakes in spelling or the use of articles when they use IN.Based on this research,it is suggested that English teachers in primary,secondary schools,or higher education,especially in the teaching of prepositions,may be more inclined to use corpus and schema to explain more diverse meanings and usages to learners,in order to help them construct and understand the more concrete concept of prepositions.At the same time,it enables the learners to master more example sentences.This research also reveals that Chinese College English learners tend to use nouns with collective or public concepts when they are near the deictic center,to a certain extent,it reflects that Chinese college EFL learners are of strong responsibility toward collectivity,the society,or our homeland,showing that Chinese college EFL learners are of a sense of collectivism and ownership towards the society. |
