A Corpus-based Study Of The Collocation Use Of The English Verb--get

Collocation is a significant part of the achievement of native-like competence. It is known as one of the ways that differentiate foreign language learners from native speakers. The corpus-based study on collocation has achieved a lot in the past 20 years at home and abroad. Nevertheless, the researches and literature on the collocations in Chinese advanced EFL learners'material are relatively limited. So the main focus of this thesis is to investigate the reasons that cause differences between mother tongue and interlanguage by describing, observing and explicating their respective linguistic performance, so as to give some helpful suggestions for the foreign language learning and instruction.Based on the comprehensive review of the present theoretical background, the thesis thoroughly investigates the Chinese learners'use of the high-frequency verb get. The detailed analysis is conducted by comparing real-life linguistic data selected from Chinese Learners English Corpus (CLEC) and British National Corpus (BNC). Because the superficial well-formedness is not a guarantee of freedom from errors, computer-aid quantitative analysis and manual qualitative classification have been used to guarantee the adequacy and accuracy of our effort.Discussion is carried out from three aspects. First, data are selected and classified. Second, we compare and analyze the data. Third, the differences and similarities of the data are found and explained. Primarily five hundred and sixty concordance lines with the get collocations are selected respectively from CLEC and BNC, which are categorized into free collocation, restricted collocation and fixed collocation. Based On these work, further sub-classifications are given to make contrastive analysis possible in accordance with the conceptual relations and grammatical relations demonstrated in the collocations. On the basis of the corpus evidence, contrastive study shows that important differences exist between native speakers and Chinese advanced learners in the use of"get"according to their selection of collocates and frequencies. The advanced Chinese English learners have a tendency to overuse some of the structures and under-use or even never use others. Native speakers show a rich variety and Chinese English learners'use and collocations are very limited. The study concludes that L2 learning is affected by native language, target language and learning strategies as well.Generally speaking, the significance of the paper is its practical implications to language instructions. It shows that even the advanced EFL learners are influenced by their mother tongue in their learning language, which also suggests that advanced learners should enhance their awareness of language difference. The survey reveals that learners are inclined to pay more attention to the some typical get meanings and have a better command of free collocations but achieve a relatively lower level of mastery of restricted collocation and fixed collocation compared with English native speakers. Chinese learners should improve their foreign language learning through optimizing their strategies on learning.Admittedly, the inadequacy of the study is its constraint on one frequent verb"get", and the number of the selected samples is small. If larger data with computational tools and statistics were used, the study would be more explanatory and convincing to English teachers and learners.