A Corpus-based Study on the Use of Affixal Negation in Chinese EFL Learners’ Writing

摘要

This paper reports a comparative study on the use of affixal negation in the writing of Chinese EFL learners based on data collected from a learner corpus,WECCL and a native-speaker corpus,LOCNESS.The findings revealed that the overall frequency of affixal negation used by Chinese students was nearly the same as that of native speakers.And the top three most frequently used negative affixes of the two groups were the same in terms of their rankings and proportion.However,when it comes to individual negative affixes,some were underused while others overused.The reasons behind were explored in the analysis of un-,dis-and in-,the top three most frequently used negative affixes by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers.Pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research were presented at the end of the paper.