How the Use of on the Other Hand is Affected by ling4-yi4-fang1-mian4

In English, on the other hand, though functioning as a listing marker in some instances is mainly categorized as a contrastive marker. However, previous research shows that it tends to be misused as an additive by many Taiwanese learners. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether such errors result from different functions between on the other hand and its common Chinese translation ling4-yi4-fang1-mian4. To see if Taiwanese learners really use on the other hand inappropriately, the NTOU learner corpus was first investigated. From the researcher’s and a native speaker's analyses, it was found that half of the thirty one entries of non-correlative on the other hand were inappropriately used as a listing marker. To find out whether such inappropriate use is related to the functions of ling4-yi4-fang1-mian4, the first two hundred entries of ling4-yi4-fang1-mian4 in the Central News Agency of Taiwan component of the Chinese GigaWord Corpus were analyzed. The analysis showed most occurrences of the phrase performed the listing function and that only a quarter or less of them contrasted utterances. These results showed that the learners' misuse of on the other hand functioned in a way more similar to ling4-y4i-fang1-mian4, which reflects the learners' problem of directly transferring the Chinese use of ling4-yi4-fang1-mian4 into their use of on the other hand. Therefore, this study suggests that when introducing the phrase on the other hand to students, teachers should emphasize its contrastive function and provide more examples of how it is used in authentic English context.

並列關鍵字

on the other hand ； ling4-y4i-fang1-mian4 ； L1 interference ； the Chinese GigaWord corpus ； learner corpus

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