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Syntactic complexity has long been taken as a significant factor in determining writing quality by EFL learners. And researchers in recent years have made a lot of efforts to devise and verify a wide range of factors or indicators for the purpose of measuring syntactic complexity or predicting EFL writing quality. The present study discussed bases itself on a self-built learner corpus with data collected over three years, with the aim of determining the applicable indices for predicting beginner writing quality. Based on previous research, the present study takes into account such factors as unit length, verb-VAC complexity, and clausal complexity. The results of pairwise comparisons by year indicate that there are significant differences for some indices but not for others. In terms of unit length, the three indicators of mean length of sentence, mean length of Tuni, and mean length of clause can serve as the main descriptive variables for the development of the language of beginners; for clausal complexity, seven indices: coordinate phrases per T-unit, verb phrases per T-unit, clauses per T-unit, coordinate phrases per clause, complex nominals per Tunit, complex nominals per clause and T-units per sentence, are the reliable indicators for beginner writing development. But indices for noun phrase complexity and verb-VAC complexity show no significant difference in the Kruskal-Wallis tests. The findings provide proof for the conclusion that knowledge and skills of modification, coordination, and subordination form the real difficulties for EFL beginners. It provides implications for coursebook design and classroom teaching where beginners are supposed to focus more on breeding awareness and skills in these aspects.

Based on the definitions of “category” and “aspect”, the article analyzes the similarities and differences between English and Chinese perfect aspect in terms of formation, meaning, and usage. Main findings are that in the first place the perfect aspect in both English and Chinese expresses the same basic meaning, and it can be used to show the accomplishment of an action, the duration of an action as well as the anteriority of an action; secondly, the perfect aspect in English must be realized by grammatical device, but that in Chinese can be realized by means of grammar together with the lexical device; thirdly, there exist differences between English perfect aspect and that in Chinese in some specific usages. The study will be of benefit to have a deeper understanding of aspect as a grammatical category, and a more skillful application of English aspect and Chinese aspect. In the meantime, such analysis will deepen the understanding of differences of grammatical category between languages and the linguistic universality and diversity.

The purpose of learning a word is to put it in actual use. It is far from being enough to know just the meaning of a word, for we have to take into consideration the immediate context in which a word is used, i.e. the words preceding and following the word in question. Both the grammatical and lexical patterns are critical to the identification of a word in a certain sense. This paper is devoted to the elaboration on the concept of collocation, the importance of collocation and how to learn collocation.

Saussure is universally recognized the “father of modern linguistics”. Saussurean linguistics marks the beginning of modern linguistics and the arbitrary nature of linguistic sign is called by Saussure “the first principle of linguistics”. This paper approaches arbitrariness by (1) clarifying the definition of arbitrariness by Saussure, (2) discussing whether onomatopoeic words and interjections are counter-evidences of arbitrariness, (3) defining the two conditions under which Saussure put forward the principle and (4) finally elaborating on the explanatory power of arbitrariness from three different perspectives. The paper concludes that arbitrariness is the fundamental principle of linguistics, for it underlies many important distinctions (concepts) in modern linguistics and accounts for many linguistic phenomena.

Chinese Students’ English has its own characteristics. It is of significance to analyze and study these characteristics. The paper uses the corpus approach to study the misuse of tenses in Chinese College students’ CET-4 compositions of the sub-corpus of “Non-major College Students” in the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). Nine types of misuse are identified, and analysis is made of the causes of each type. It is found that the misuse of tenses in Chinese college students’ English compositions is mainly in the simple present tense and the simple past tense; the wrong collocation of tenses is mostly in the kind of complex sentence with the main clause and subordinate clause both indicating the future action and the subordinate clause using the simple present tense; as for the two special words “could” and “would” with both declarative and subjunctive usages, Chinese students often get confused and misuse them; students have vague understanding of the time concept indicated by the different tenses. Based on the analysis, the author tentatively provide some interpretations for these mistakes: many problems exist in the teaching of grammar in Chinese English teaching, and the teaching of tenses is not systematic and the focus of teaching and tests is not in accordance with the actual uses of tenses; students are affected by inter-lingual transfer and intra-lingual transfer when making English sentences. At last, some suggestions are offered by the author for the teaching of tenses: teachers should combine systematic teaching of tenses with the teaching of tenses in actual contexts and students should try to write English compositions using different tenses.