Dative alternation between prepositional and double object datives has been a popular topic in second language (L2) acquisition, but only few studies deal with discourse constraints such as the "given-before-new" principle, or given-new (GN) ordering, which describes the tendency to place given information before new information. The…

This study demonstrates how native and learner corpora can enhance modal verb treatment in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks used in mainland China. Data analysis compares modal verbs in the textbook and native corpus by referring to distributional features, semantic functions and co-occurring constructions; and the analysis of the…

This article hypothesizes that one of the reasons for Chinese EFL learners' rigid use of nominalization and insufficient use of hedging in academic writing can be attributed to the unclear understanding of the relationship between these two expressions. The aim of the research is to first prove and then explain the possible co-occurrence of…

While more Chinese students are going abroad to persue their further academic study, how to help them improve academic writing competence has received wide attention. Modality, as one of the complex areas of English grammar, reflects the writer's attitude and is extremely important in academic written discourse. Therefore, it is necessary to…

In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e. "sub"ject (noun) vs. sub"ject" (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress…

The paper makes a contrastive study on the performance of verb-noun collocation given by Chinese EFL learners based on the CLEC, ICLE and BNC. First, all the concordance lines with the token "ability" in the CLEC were collected and analyzed. Then, they were tagged manually in order to sort out the sentences in the verb-noun collocation…

The present study examined the language development of children adopted from China to examine possible early age effects with respect to their use of complement clitics, lexical diversity and verb morphology. We focused on these aspects of French because they distinguish second language learners of French and native French-speaking children with…

By adopting corpus-based approach in this research study, the authors examined the various aspects of the copular verbs used by Chinese school children learning English. This study revealed that Chinese school children use copular verbs less frequently than native English speakers; they select a limited variety of copular verbs and less often use…

This is a corpus-based research focusing on the high-frequency verb "keep" used by Chinese non-English majors and native speakers. The corpora involved in the paper are Brown which stands for native speakers, Students 3 and Students 4 in CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) which stand for Chinese non-English majors. The paper tries to…

This study focused on the acquisition of the dative verb by Chinese learners of English as a Second Language. The study proposes that the learner acquires basic semantic structure for the double-object dative via the "near universal linking rules that map thematic roles to syntactic positions. On semantic grounds, the learner might then use…

To many Chinese students, learning the words such as "make" and "do" seems a piece of cake, yet learning how to use them appropriately is anther case. This paper aims to investigate Chinese learners' use of the verbs "make" and "do", two major representatives of high-frequency words from the perspective of…

Investigated how Chinese-speaking English-as-a-Second-Language (L2) learners developed second language (L2) knowledge of conflation classes of verbs in the formation of prenominal adjectival participles. Groups of L2 learners and native English speakers judged the acceptability of prenominal adjectival participles placed in four linguistic…