A corpus-based study of the alternating ditransitive verb TELL in native and Chinese learner English corpora

This corpus-based study compares the use of the alternating ditransitive verb TELL by native speakers and Chinese learners of English. The corpora used are the written sub-corpus of ICE-GB (the British component of International Corpus of English) and CLEC (the Chinese Learner English Corpus). CLEC consists of both lowand high-proficiency L2 learners’ writing. By incorporating corpus contrastive interlanguage analysis and usage-based approaches to language acquisition, this study shows some distinctive patterns in the use of ditransitive TELL by Chinese L2 learners, including some speech-like features of L2 writing. The findings seem to support the ‘pronoun island’ hypothesis, and the item-based learning process in second language learning.