Abstract
On the basis of comparisons between the corpus of English Majors’ Composition of Ludong University (EMC corpus) and other corpora as well as among different levels in EMC corpus, this thesis studies the feature of using frequency and stages of development of demonstratives used by Chinese English Majors. The result reveals that English Majors of lower and higher grades tend to overuse and underuse demonstratives respectively; with their better and better command of English, the using frequency of demonstratives tends to be closer to that of native speakers’ except for the proportion of the using frequency of singular to plural demonstratives as demonstrative pronouns as well as the using frequency of plural demonstratives.
Highlights
Chen Ping (1994) proves that “this” is usually chosen to be cataphora, whereas “that” is occasionally used in this way. This comparison tells that learners in EMC corpus need to improve the use of singular demonstratives as cataphora
It is striking to see that Chinese English majors (EMC &W) have the same tendency with native speakers in the relative proportion between proximal and distal demonstratives in terms of overall frequency, the frequency of being determiners as well as the frequency of being pronouns in EMC corpus
This research finds that: compared with native speakers, English majors of lower grades in EMC corpus have the tendency of overusing demonstratives, whereas those of higher grades in W corpus have the trend to underusing them
Summary
The corpus consists of compositions of English Majors in Ludong University. The compositions originate from the final exam on comprehensive English of Grade 2008, 2007 and 2006 respectively in the first semester of the school year 2008-2009. The token of the corpus is 87,606 words, with 31,348 words in Grade 2008, 30,381 words in Grade 2007, and 25,877 words in Grade 2006
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