IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ibn/eltjnl/v5y2012i6p154.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Corpus-based Study of the Infinitive Errors Made by Chinese College Students

Author

Listed:
  • Lixin XIA

Abstract

The paper discusses the infinitive errors made by Chinese college students. From the CLEC, all infinitive errors tagged as [vp5] are collected, and then the general distribution of the errors among 4 groups of college students is shown. Moreover, these errors are classified into 12 categories according to the characteristics of the usage. After manual classification, we can see the main distribution features of these errors clearly. The most common infinitive errors fall into the category of “doing?do†, i.e. misuses of a gerund where a base verb should be used. It is surprised to find that the category of “do?did/done†ranks the second in the number of errors in the CLEC in which case Chinese learners use the structure of “to + the past tense or past participle of a verb†in their written works. Finally, possible causes of these errors are given and ways to avoid them are suggested.

Suggested Citation

  • Lixin XIA, 2012. "A Corpus-based Study of the Infinitive Errors Made by Chinese College Students," English Language Teaching, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 5(6), pages 154-154, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:ibn:eltjnl:v:5:y:2012:i:6:p:154
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/article/download/17477/11649
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/article/view/17477
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • R00 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General - - - General
    • Z0 - Other Special Topics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ibn:eltjnl:v:5:y:2012:i:6:p:154. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Canadian Center of Science and Education (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cepflch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.