Abstract
The paper discusses the infinitive errors made by Chinese college students. From the CLEC, all infinitive errors tagged as [vp5] are collected, and then the general distribution of the errors among 4 groups of college students is shown. Moreover, these errors are classified into 12 categories according to the characteristics of the usage. After manual classification, we can see the main distribution features of these errors clearly. The most common infinitive errors fall into the category of “doing?do”, i.e. misuses of a gerund where a base verb should be used. It is surprised to find that the category of “do?did/done” ranks the second in the number of errors in the CLEC in which case Chinese learners use the structure of “to + the past tense or past participle of a verb” in their written works. Finally, possible causes of these errors are given and ways to avoid them are suggested.
Highlights
The infinitive represents a typical problem for Chinese learners in their process of learning English
This study aims to find out the most common errors made by Chinese learners in their English texts based on the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC)
As this study focuses on the errors made by college students, we will select the material from st3, st4, st5 and st6, which amounts to about 800,000 tokens in all
Summary
The infinitive represents a typical problem for Chinese learners in their process of learning English. Through data retrieval in the corpus, we got 437 [vp5] tags in the four sub-corpora of the CLEC All categories of college students will make errors when they use the infinitive without obvious difference between each category. The reason why this situation arises may be due to the negative transfer of Chinese because we don’t have the infinitive forms in Chinese. Chinese learners may overgeneralize the rules of the infinitive, and overuse the infinitive form where a present participle or a gerund should be used
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