Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 29, 19 April 2024
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Investigating Idiomatic English for Chinese ESL/EFL Learners: Corpus Investigation of Using the Genitive Marker in English Written Texts
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Abstract
While the genitive marker in English is early encountered in language teaching, the result of learning is seldom researched over the past 20 years in mainland China. This paper describes queries of how the genitive marker in English is used in British National Corpus and by Chinese native speakers in Longman Learners Corpus. Results showed that: 1) Chinese native speakers and English native speakers have different lexical choices for the possessors and the possessums before and after the marker; 2) the difference might be because of culture, mother tongue, and the learners’ limited understanding of English word meaning; 3) Chinese learners sometimes overuse ’s in a N-N genitive. The contribution of this paper is to alarm on non-idiomatic usages of small, critical English language morphemes by Chinese learners of English as a second or foreign language (ESL or EFL), and even greater issues of language learning attitude and teaching methodology.
Keywords
corpus linguistics, genitive marker, learner English
References
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the International Conference on Global Politics and Socio-Humanities
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-83558-365-4
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-366-1
- Published Date
- 19 April 2024
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/29/20230540
- Copyright
- 19 April 2024
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited