中国英语专业学生英语议论文句法复杂性研究

A study on the syntactic complexity of English essays written by Chinese students of English

本研究对比分析中国英语专业学生与英语本族语者在议论文中句法复杂性的差异。指标有单位长度(W/T和W/C)、单位密度(C/T和DC/C)、四类句子、从句、紧缩子句和限定与非限定动词的被动形式。结果表明,中国英语专业学生的单位长度和密度与语言能力变化方向一致。长度指标显著低于本族语者,密度在多数情况下也显著偏小。简单句在4年级和写作高分组下降显著,状语、宾语和表语从句随年级的升高只呈下降趋势。中国学生对上述句型的使用显著多于本族语者。紧缩子句和被动句只在写作高分组中显著增多,但低于本族语者。

This paper reports the differences in syntactic complexity between essays written by Chinese students of English and by native English speakers.'Syntactic complexity' includes the length of T units(W/T) and clauses(W/C),embeddedness — the ratios of clauses to T units(C/T) and of dependent clauses to clauses(DC/C),and syntactic structures covering independent and dependent clauses,passives and reduced structures.The results reveal that the length and embeddedness indexes increase in line with their English proficiency.Compared with native speakers,the length indexes demonstrated by the Chinese students are significantly lower and the embeddedness indexes show a similar tendency in most cases.The use of adverbial,object and complement clauses shows an insignificant decline as the Chinese students go from their first year to later years,while the number of simple sentences shows a significant drop in year 4 and among better student writers,but is significantly higher than that of native speakers.There is a significant rise in the use of passives and reduced structures in the high-score group,but it is significantly lower than that of the native speakers.