A CLEC-Based Analysis On Adjective-Noun Collocation Errors By Chinese College English Learners From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

Lexical learning plays an important role in English teaching. However, only masteringthe meanings and forms of the vocabulary can not enhance the learners’ English proficiency.After many years of English study, English learners, especially Chinese college Englishlearners have accumulated a large number of words. But the learners still commit manylexical collocation errors which can have some negative effects on their daily English use andexpressions. Obviously, Chinese college English learners’ collocation competence plays acrucial part in the learners’ language fluency and accuracy. A large number of collocationerrors committed by English learners are studied and analyzed by scholars at home andabroad. Most of them are the studies on verb-noun collocation errors. However, according toCLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus), the number of errors of adjective-noun collocationcommitted by Chinese college English learners ranks only second to the number of errors ofverb-noun collocation. Therefore, the adjective-noun collocation errors of Chinese collegeEnglish learners can not be neglected. Scholars from home and abroad have alreadyconducted many analyses on adjective-noun collocation errors. But the studies which aim atthoroughly analyzing the adjective-noun collocation errors from a new perspective arerelatively few in number.Against this background, this thesis makes a tentative analysis on the adjective-nouncollocation errors of Chinese college English learners from the perspective of conceptualtransfer. In this study, AntConc3.2.1w software is used to extract the adjective-nouncollocation errors in CLEC. These collocation errors derive from the four sub-corpora inCLEC, namely ST3, ST4, ST5and ST6. These collocation errors are regarded as the linguisticdata of this study. The study aims at answering the following three questions.(1) What are the classifications of Chinese college English learners’ adjective-nouncollocation errors?(2) What are the characteristics of Chinese college English learners’adjective-noun collocation errors?(3) What are the possible causes of the adjective-nouncollocation errors from the perspective of conceptual transfer?The results show:(1) a combined taxonomy is used to classify all the adjective-nouncollocation errors into9categories. Then the example errors of each category in thesub-corpora are extracted and explained in detail.(2) On the basis of the previousclassifications, the number of the errors in each category is counted and the normalized data isobtained. The data demonstrates that among all these9categories of adjective-noun collocation errors, the most prominent error category is misuse of adjective/adjective phrasein adjective-noun collocation. The second most prominent error category is language transfer.Furthermore, according to the normalized data, the number of the adjective-noun collocationerrors in ST4is more than the errors in ST3. The number of the adjective-noun collocationerrors in ST6is more than the errors in ST5. As is shown by SPSS17.0, there is no significantdifference between the number of errors and the second language proficiency. To some extent,there is no significant difference between the learners’ collocation competence and thelanguage proficiency.(3) Under the guidance of conceptual transfer, this thesis tentativelyputs forward the possible causes of adjective-noun collocation errors from three respects.Namely, ignorance of the conceptual system differences between Chinese and English leads tomisusing/mis-constructing L1-based concepts, shared concepts and L2-based concepts. Inview of the above, some suggestions which are related to the English collocation teaching areproposed. It is hoped that these suggestions can have some positive effects on the collocationlearning in the future.This thesis makes an explanation on the possible causes of Chinese college Englishlearners’ adjective-noun collocation errors from the perspective of conceptual transfer. It ishoped that English teachers and learners can realize that language learning not only involveslearning its linguistic forms but also aims at making the learners master the inherentconceptual system of languages.