English prepositions, characterized by high frequency, semantic diversity, and complex usage, exhibit collocational behavior and semantic features that reliably reflect lexical collocational competence for both native speakers and EFL learners. Within the co-selection framework, this study explores the collocational behaviors and semantic features of the pattern PREP+NP (specifically UNDER, ON, and OVER) in Chinese learner English and native English, based on a contrastive corpus analysis of CLEC and FLOB/FROWN. The results indicate that compared with native speakers, the spatial prepositions used by Chinese EFL learners also exhibit their specific semantic features, which are closely associated with the specific semantic preference and semantic prosody of the given pattern used by them. However, the patterns employed by learners tend to show considerable difference from native speakers in terms of distribution, semantic preference and semantic prosody. Chinese EFL learners tend to use patterns with similar literal meanings interchangeably, these typical patterns are co-defined by grammatical features, semantic preference and semantic prosody.

Huihui Yang, Gengchun Li, Yong Pan. Multi-dimensional Semantic Profiles in L2 Spatial Preposition Usage: A Comparable Corpus-based Analysis of Chinese EFL Learners and Native English Speakers. International Journal of New Developments in Education (2026), Vol. 8, Issue 8: 7-16. https://doi.org/10.25236/IJNDE.2026.080802.

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