8 Conclusion 23

9 Limitations 24

The bare infinitives are not included 24

Systematic errors 24

Table contents:

Table 1 。10

Table 2 12

Table 3 13

Table 4 13

Table 5 14

Table 6 14

Table 7 15

Table 8 16

   Figure contents:

Figure 1 17

1   Introduction

The infinitive in English language is a multifunctional lexical device which can be placed in various places of a sentence, as its name indicates, it is non-finite。 In this way, there tends to be less grammatical restrictions for it to collocate with units in a sentence。 Thus to study an infinitive in terms of its collocation with others is a way in researching its syntactic features。 As is often the case, in English infinitives often come in two major categories, as Sara Quintero Ramírez (2015: 182) argues “many European languages (such as English, French and Spanish) have a bare form and a form preceded by a specific particle。” Since the bare infinitive has no syntactic feature to be recognized in the text, this paper discusses the TO infinitives, as this kind of infinitives has a constant particle TO, which can be immediately identified in a corpus with the aid of certain computational method。 

2 Research principle

As is mentioned above this research is set in concerning the relationship between the TO infinitive and its neighboring lexical device。 In this case the concept of colligation (Firth: 1957) is cited as “the syntactic juxtaposition of two or more categories”。 As its definition shows, the colligation means having the central word studied in a research suited by the words or phrases next to it。 And it also shows only one single category can be meaningless, while two or more work。 文献综述

And as we observe, when the particle TO in the TO infinitives is next to different grammatical devices, it also tends to plays different grammatical functions。 Some most common cases are as follows。 When the particle TO, its first letter capitalized, it means that the particle itself starts the whole sentence as the subject of the sentence, in that case TO itself is preceded by a full stop period mark ”。” 

The same happens to the case such as when the TO infinitive is as the direct object such as (I want TO follow you。) in this case, the particle “to” is preceded left by the lexical verb “want” this kind of relatively fixed relationships of the colligation and its grammatical functions will help us in designing this survey, we can distinguish the infinitives in English sentences by just sorting out the categorizations of the preceding parts in the TO infinitives。

3 SWECCL 2。0 Corpus

The corpus this paper uses is the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners is a corpus launch by FLTRP in 2008。 The program chief is professor 文秋芳。 As this study focuses on the ESL college students’ written language, the study only restricts in using one sub corpus of the SWEEL, which is under the title of WECCL, the written English corpus of Chinese learners。 This corpus collects a total token of 1248476 written by the different level students from more than 20 different schools。 And the written corpus is the test composition result of the mainstream English test from the past decade。