Analysis of an English Major’s Writing.doc

Analysis of an English Major?s Writing [Abstract] Corpus-based approach has become a well-proven method in linguistic study. The present paper attempts to make an analysis of an English major?s written journals in corpus approach. Through data analysis, this paper finds some typical mistakes in the subject?s writing and makes some suggestions for the learner?s future study. [Key words] Corpus writing L1 transfer 1.Introduction Since its birth in 1960s, Corpus Linguistics has brought a new and useful method to investigate linguistic data. According to John Sinclair(1991), a corpus is a collection of naturally occurring language text, chosen to characterize a state or variety of a language. As corpus collects “natural” linguistic data---language that people used in communication, it is a performance-based approach (Yang, 2002: 9). Compared with the traditional approaches to linguistics, i.e. introspection and elicitation, the corpus-based approach is convenient for it can be accessed using various types of software packages, thus corpus-based approach to linguistic investigation has shown its powerful advantages to better serve linguistic purposes. Sinclair has claimed that the systematic study of large corpora yields information about language use that is not available to unaided intuition: …the contrast exposed between the impressions of language detail noted by people, and the evidence compiled objectively from texts is huge and systematic. It leads one to suppose that human intuition about language is highly specific, and not at all a good guide to what actually happens when the same people actually use the language(Sinclair, 1991:4). This paper explores some features of a Chinese English major?s written journals and analyzes some of the typical mistakes. Hopefully it will provide new evidence to the present linguistic study with the corpus-based approach. 2. General analysis of the journal corpus 2.1 An overall picture of the written journa