The Negative Transfer of Mother Tongue in Non-English Majors’ Compositions from the Perspective of Syntax

Abstract

This paper is an effort to explore the transfer problem at lexical level in the compositions of non-English majors. The negative transfer of Chinese sentence patterns in Chinese non-major students' English compositions reflects negative transfer of Chinese thought patterns. Three kinds of different sentence patterns are discussed respectively. A statistics is conducted here to calculate the frequency of three kinds of erroneous sentences typical of Chinese sentence patterns in non-major students' English compositions.