A Corpus-Based Study on the Use of High-Frequency Prepositions between Chinese English Learners and Native Speakers

This paper uses corpus-based interlanguage comparative analysis to investigate the similarities and differences in frequency and collocations of ten high-frequency prepositions in native English speakers' corpus and Chinese learners' corpus. The results show that the overall frequency of these ten prepositions in each corpus is on the relative level, but there are phenomena of overuse and underuse when it comes to the use of every single preposition. In addition, it is found that Chinese English learners and native speakers have great differences in the use of prepositional collocations, which is caused by various factors.