臺灣博碩士論文加值系統

本研究以詞性(part of speech)的角度來探討台灣學習者於英文寫作中從屬連接詞的使用錯誤。初步調查的資料顯示學生的確在使用從屬連接詞時，有誤用其詞性的現象。在過去的研究中，雖然有研究探討過學習者學習從屬連接詞時的現象，但是卻很少有研究以英語為第二語言的學習者為研究對象，分析其從屬連接詞的使用狀況、所犯的從屬連接詞錯誤類型、以及從屬連接詞錯誤類型是否與從屬連接詞的詞性有相關聯性。因此，此研究的研究目的在於分析和歸類學生的從屬連接詞錯誤，並探究從屬連接詞彼此間相似的詞性是否會產生類似的錯誤類型，希望藉此研究結果來提供網路英語教學的應用。
本研究資料利用「台灣英語學習者語料庫(English TLC)」(目前藏字量超過兩百萬字)中所儲存的學習者語料，以學習者所認為該從屬連接詞的詞性來分類從屬連接詞的錯誤。研究結果顯示從屬連接詞的錯誤和從屬連接詞本身的詞性並無密切關聯。此外，本研究並根據研究結果，開發出能自動偵測部份學生使用從屬連接詞的錯誤，以及幫助學生避免此類錯誤的文法設計，並為未來更進一步的研究提出相關的建議。

This thesis is an investigation of subordinators’ parts of speech in Taiwan learners’ English writing. A corpus of Taiwan learners’ English shows that learners misuse some subordinators’ parts of speech, for instance, *I think it is all because [a woman's greed]. While this part of speech poses problems for learners, little research has focused on how learners’ use subordinators, what type of errors learners produce, and the correlation between subordinators’ parts of speech and learners’ subordinator errors. Thus, the purposes of this thesis are (1) to investigate learners’ subordinator use and errors, (2) to find error patterns in their use of subordinators, (3) to test whether there is a connection between subordinators’ parts of speech and their error patterns, and (4) to design an online grammar checker and grammar help based on these findings to help students develop a better grasp of English subordinators.
The investigation covers the fifteen most frequently occurring subordinators in the British National Corpus (BNC) and examines learners’ use of them in learner essays stored in a corpus named English Taiwan Learner Corpus (English TLC). All sentences with any of the fifteen subordinators in learner essays were then extracted and categorized according to learners’ perspective of the subordinators’ parts of speech. Subordinator errors were categorized in the same way too. The findings suggest that there exist patterns among subordinator errors, and that subordinators’ similarities in parts of speech do not seem to highly correlate with identical error patterns though semantic similarity among subordinators did correlate with some similarities in their error patterns.
The results contribute to two applications: (1) the design of an online grammar checker that can automatically detect certain patterns of subordinator errors, and (2) the design of grammar help tutorials aimed at helping learners to avoid some sorts of subordinator errors and at instructing students on related grammar concepts regarding subordinators. Relevant issues and future work have also been reported.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHINESE ABSTRACT v
ENGLISH ABSTRACT vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ix
LIST OF TABLES xii
LIST OF FIGURES xiii
CHAPTER
1. INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 Motivation and Background 1
1.2 Scope and Purposes of the Study 3
1.3 Organization of the Thesis 4
1.4 Summary of Chapter 1 5
2. LINGUISTIC PROPERTIES AND LITERATURE REVIEW OF SUBORDINATORS 6
2.1 Linguistic Properties 6
2.1.1 Subordinators 7
2.1.2 Coordinators 10
2.1.3 Syntactic Features of Coordinators and a Comparison with Subordinators 11
2.2 Previous Studies on Subordinators 14
2.3 Summary of Chapter 2 18
3. CORPUS DATA AND DISTRIBUTION OF SUBORDINATOR USES AND ERRORS 19
3.1 Corpus Data 19
3.1.1 Writing Environment 20
3.1.2 English Taiwan Learner Corpus (English TLC) 22
3.2 Extraction of Sentences with Subordinators 26
3.3 Typology of Subordinator Errors 32
3.4 Distribution of Subordinator Errors 37
3.5 Summary of Chapter 3 41
4. ERROR PATTERNS OF SUBORDINATORS AND DISCUSSION
OF SOME POSSIBLE REASONS FOR SOME OF THE ERROR
PATTERNS 42
4.1 Subordinators Error Patterns 42
4.1.1 The Patterns of POS Internal Errors in the Use of
Subordinators 43
4.1.2 The Patterns of POS Changing Errors in the Use of Subordinators 50
4.2 Possible Rationales for Some Error Patterns 68
4.3 Summary of Chapter 4 78
5. ON DESIGNING A GRAMMAR CHECKER AND GRAMMAR
HELP 80
5.1 Designing the Grammar Checker 80
5.1.1 Regular Expressions and a Pilot Experiment 82
5.1.1.1 Two conjunctions Within One Sentence 82
5.1.1.2 Sentence Fragment 84
5.1.1.3 ‘Subject + -ing’ Following Subordinator 86
5.1.1.4 Subordinator as Preposition 87
5.1.2 Technical Schema of the Grammar Checker Design 93
5.2 Designing the Grammar Help 94
5.2.1 Grammar Help Design for Two Conjunctions Within One Sentence 97
5.2.2 Grammar Help Design for Sentence Fragment 99
5.2.3 Grammar Help Design for ‘Subject + -ing’ Following Subordinator 102
5.2.4 Grammar Help Design for Subordinator as Preposition
104
5.3 Summary of Chapter 5 105
6. CONCLUSIONS 107
BIBLIOGRAPHY 110
APPENDIX A: Quirk et al.’s List of Four Types of Subordinators 113
APPENDIX B: BNC’s Complete Frequency List of Conjunctions 114
APPENDIX C: The Error Pattern and the Design of Grammar Checker and Help for Subordinator Preceded by ‘That’ 116
APPENDIX D: List of POS Internal Errors in the Use of Subordinators 119
APPENDIX E: List of POS Changing Errors in the Use of
Subordinators 128
APPENDIX F: Errors Automatically Detected by Proposed Subordinator
Error Rules 145

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