A Corpus-based Study of Developmental Stages of Demonstratives in Chinese English Majors’ Writing

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.