Error Types in TUFS International Learners’ Corpora of English and Chinese :
Acquisition of Prepositions in English and “One+Classifier”in Chinese

MOCHIZUKI Keiko

Keywords:

Learners’ Corpora of English and Chinese, Comparative Analysis of English and Chinese, Interlanguage, “Unboundedness”in Japanese, Spatial Lexicon, Individuality

 

This paper focuses on “Unboundedness”in the Japanese lexicon by analyzing error types in TUFS International Learners’ Corpora of English and Chinese.

First, we will examine error types in the prepositions “in/on/at/of”in TUFS International Learners’ Corpus of English. As Mochizuki and Newbery-Payton (2016) showed, the overuse of “of”is more frequently observed among Japanese learners of English, as compared with Chinese learners of English at Shanghai International Studies University. This is due to the flexible function of the Japanese genitive marker “-no”which can form the construction [Modifier Noun Phrase +“-no”+ Head Noun] with various semantic relations. In contrast, the English prepositions “in/on/at/for/from”are classified according to spatial images.

Second, “Unboundedness”in the Japanese lexicon is also suggested through an underuse of “One + Classifier”in the Japanese learners’ corpus while there is a significant overuse of “One + Classifier”in the English-native-speakers’ corpus.