A Corpus-based Study Of Verb-Noun Collocation Errors In Chinese Non-English Majors' Written English

Collocation is a linguistic phenomenon of significant importance in language learning. Appropriate competence of collocation is regarded as one of the crucial criteria of successful language acquisition. The verb-noun errors committed by students show that both verbs and nouns play important role in vocabulary study. Thus it is natural that verb-noun collocations are paid great attention to by both English linguistics and language teachers.The present study was undertaken to investigate the verb-noun collocation errors committed by Chinese non-English majors in their writings for the purpose of finding out the types and distribution frequencies of such errors, and examining the correlation between the Chinese non-English majors'verb-noun collocation errors and their English writing proficiency levels. The data employed in the study were selected from sub-corpus st3 and st4 of the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). CLEC, an error-tagged written corpus with over one million words compiled by Professor Yanghuizhong, is the first authoritative and the biggest corpus available in China. The research questions to be addressed in the present study are as follows:1. What types of verb-noun collocation errors are found in Chinese non-English majors'writings?2. What are the frequencies of different types of verb-noun collocation errors distributed in Chinese non-English majors'writings?3. Is there any significant correlation between the number of verb-noun collocation errors committed by Chinese non-English majors and their English writing proficiency levels?The present study has yielded the following major findings:1) The verb-noun collocation errors committed by Chinese learners are slightly different from Nesselhauf's classification. Specifically, errors of misuse of prepositions collocated with nouns are not found in ST3, and are almost not found in ST4; besides, neither errors of the syntactic structures nor errors of inappropriate use of determiners are found in ST4. The possible cause for this could be the negative transfer related to the typological differences between Chinese and English. In other words, the English language frequently uses relative pronouns, relative adverbs, conjunctions, especially prepositions, etc. to express its semantic connections. By contrast, the Chinese language basically relies on verbs and their word orders for this purpose. Such typological differences motivated Chinese students to avoid using English prepositions in their English writings, causing them to commit, few or no, errors of prepositions or determiners in their writings. At the same time, the heavy reliance on verbs accounts for Chinese students to commit more wrong-choice-of-verb errors. Therefore, present study summarizes eight kinds of verb-noun collocation errors in ST3 and six types of verb-noun collocation errors in ST4.2) Of all the verb-noun collocation errors listed in the present study, the error frequency related to verbs rank the first of all types of verb-noun collocation errors, and errors related to nouns (wrong choice of noun and misuse of prepositions collocated with nouns) rank the second, followed by misuse1, misuse 2, misuse of number of nouns, misuse of prepositions collocated with verbs, inappropriate use of determiners and errors of the syntactic structures. Errors related to verbs take up 74% and 76% respectively in ST3 and ST4.3) Learners are found to overuse verbs with general meanings or everyday life verbs, such as get, make and have, regardless of their semantic incompatibility. There are several possible reasons for such a high percentage: first, verbs are among the most difficult linguistic elements in the process of second language acquisition, because, as pointed out by Nesselhauf (2005), the verb is arbitrarily restricted in its collocability, which naturally makes its usage more difficult; second, the negative transfer or literal translation is the most important cause, as many foreign language learners take it for granted that every linguistic element has its counterpart in their mother tongue, thus they tend to use verbs regardless of their semantic features; The second largest number of errors are related to nouns (wrong choice of nouns and misuse of number of nouns), making up 12% and 11% respectively in ST3 and ST4. One possible cause could also be attributed to negative transfer from Chinese because the plural forms of Chinese nouns are realized in different ways. Another possible reason is overgeneralization of certain rules; for example: adding"s"to form the plural form of all nouns. Of the total numbers, errors related to verbs and nouns account for 82% in ST3 and 84% in ST4. Besides, the number of misuse 1 is relatively higher than other types of verb-noun collocation errors. Apart from negative transfer, teachers'induction is possibly another importance cause.4) In general, learners'verb-noun collocation capability improves with the development of their language proficiency. The higher score they get, the fewer errors they make. However, there are some exceptions. For example: in ST3, cc3 errors in compositions that score 8 outnumber those in other compositions. In ST4, the cc3 errors in compositions that score 10 outnumber those in other compositions. This is possibly because students with low proficiency try hard to avoid using some verb-noun collocations. As a result, they make fewer mistakes than students with high proficiency. Besides, students whose compositions score 10 commit more verb-noun errors. This is possibly motivated by their stronger desire to express themselves. This, to a certain extent, confirms Ellis'hypothesis about learners'developmental features in their L2 acquisition. In spite of some exceptions, on the whole, the number of Chinese non-English-major college students'verb-noun collocation errors is negatively correlated with the learners'L2 proficiency levels.The findings of the present study have the following pedagogical implications:First, proper efforts should be made on the part of the teacher to help Chinese English learners have some knowledge about the typological differences between Chinese and English; especially the distinctive features of English prepositions, determiners, various discourse connectives non-finite verbs, etc.Second, teachers are expected to treat the errors committed by learners in a scientific way, because some errors suggest the different acquisition processes which the learners are going through, and some errors indicate the learners'stronger desire to communicate with others. In such cases, learners should be given individual help instead of indiscriminate criticisms.