An Investigation Into The Adjective-noun Collocations

The notion 'collocation' was first put forward by Firth in 1950s. Many linguists and language teachers have noticed its importance and many specific analyses and studies on collocation have been made in recent years. It is proved that collocation plays an important role in the acquisition of the second language.The present study is based on corpus and aims to investigate the use of three synonymous adjective collocations, i.e. great, big, and large by Chinese EFL learners at two different proficiency levels. Meanwhile, the Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis(CIA) approach was adopted. Through the comparison between the sub-corpora St3 and St6 in CLEC and the native corpus SCOBUILD, some characteristics of the adjective-nouns by the Chinese learners in St3 and St6 are presented in terms of quantity, the degree of appropriateness and typicality. The study shows that the Chinese learners in St3 and St6 have the tendency to overuse the adjective collocations, but they produced fewer collocation types than the native speakers. Furthermore, the study finds that there are very few adjective collocations both shared by the Chinese learners and native speakers, which also differ in T-score and Mi-score. By the comparison between St3 and St6, we find that there is sign of progress in terms of the developmental competence between the Chinese learners at two proficiency levels, though the degree of development is not evident and significant.Our investigation on the three adjective-noun collocations shows that there are some factors affecting the acquisition of the collocations, such as the strategies of interference of L1, repetition, etc. So the author believes that collocations should be paid more attention in language teaching and learning, and tries to provide some suggestions from the perspective of teachers.