中国学生作文中介词回避现象.docVIP

AVOIDANCE OF PREPOSITIONS IN COMPOSITIONS WRITTEN BY CHINESE STUDENTS 中国学生作文中的介词回避现象 Chen Zhaoxia March, 2005 Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to my supervisor, professor Wang Junju, for her kind assistance and insightful suggestion. This thesis would not have been possible without Prof. Wangs scrutiny. Besides, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to professor Wang Shouyuan; professor Miao Xingwei, professor Liu Zhenqian, professor Li Yuchen, professor Chen Cuifeng and professor Li Xuezhen etc. their thought-stimulating lectures have benefited me much. I am also grateful to my classmates for their warm help in the course o f my thesis-writing. Finally, I owe a lot to my husband, Wang Xin, who has contributed to the formation of my MA thesis by giving me financial aid and spiritual support. Abstract English is a language of prepositions. English prepositions are characterized by polysemy, mufti-function and high frequency. These characteristics make prepositions a most difficult target language (TL) item for Chinese students to learn. Cognitive linguists, structuralists and functionalists have studied English prepositions from different perspectives. Their researches are theoretically significant and help Chinese students understand English prepositions more profoundly. Unlike the above researches, this current study focuses on preposition use rather than preposition understanding so that prepositions can be investigated from a new angle. While prepositions such as over, up, on, and across are considered in the previous studies, the preposition of is researched on in this paper. The more difficult a TL item is, the more likely Chinese students are to commit errors when using it. To avoid language errors, Chinese students tend to avoid using prepositions. Avoidance of this kind means prepositions are underused. In other words, though prepositions occur in Chinese students compositions, they appear less frequently when compared wi