Investigating Idiomatic English for Chinese ESL/EFL Learners: Corpus Investigation of Using the Genitive Marker in English Written Texts

While the genitive marker in English is early encountered in language teaching, the result of learning is seldom researched over the past 20 years in mainland China. This paper describes queries of how the genitive marker in English is used in British National Corpus and by Chinese native speakers in Longman Learners Corpus. Results showed that: 1) Chinese native speakers and English native speakers have different lexical choices for the possessors and the possessums before and after the marker; 2) the difference might be because of culture, mother tongue, and the learners limited understanding of English word meaning; 3) Chinese learners sometimes overuse s in a N-N genitive. The contribution of this paper is to alarm on non-idiomatic usages of small, critical English language morphemes by Chinese learners of English as a second or foreign language (ESL or EFL), and even greater issues of language learning attitude and teaching methodology.