A Corpus-Based Study Of Verb-Noun Collocation Errors In Chinese Non-English Majors’English Writing

This paper investigates verb-noun collocation errors in English writing by Chinese non-English major college students.Based on 1,679 English compositions by 369non-English major students in Dalian University of Technology,the corpus named NE＿EWC＿MA＿2018 is built and contains about 298,000 words.The corpus covers 4 genres,namely argumentative,expository,descriptive,and narrative essays,and consists of 11 composition topics.According to Nesselhauf’s study,verb-noun collocation errors in this study are classified into 9 types: errors of verbs,errors of nouns,errors of usage 1(combinations exists but is not used correctly),errors of usage 2(nonexistent combinations),errors of verb prepositions,errors of noun prepositions,errors of determiners,errors of numbers and errors of structure.There are three main research questions:(1)What types of verb-noun collocation errors do Chinese non-English majors make in their English writing?(2)What are possible causes of verb-noun collocation errors in Chinese non-English majors’ English writing from the perspective of conceptual transfer?(3)What is the relationship between types and causes of verb-noun collocation errors in Chinese non-English majors’ English writing?Firstly,this study designs the tagging system to tag verb-noun collocation errors of texts in the corpus firstly.Secondly,all types of errors are retrieved according to research questions.Finally,errors are analyzed and the causes from the perspective of conceptual transfer and the relationship between causes and error types are discussed.It is found that:(1)Among the 9 types of verb-noun collocation errors,the error frequency from high to low is as follows: errors of verbs(36%),errors of usage 2(23%),errors of nouns(12%),errors of verb prepositions(8%),errors of determiners(6%),errors of numbers(6%),errors of noun prepositions(3%),errors of usage 1(3%)and errors of structure(1%).(2)Errors are caused by the conceptual transfer,i.e.L1-based concepts,shared concepts and L2-based concepts,which results in the confusion of differences between mother tongue and second language,and mainly manifested in word-to-word translation and ignorance of characteristics of English.(3)Among them,all errors of nouns,all errors of usage 2,90% errors of verbs,and 38% errors of verb prepositions are caused by L1-based concepts;all errors of usage 1 and 10% errors of verbs are mainly affected by shared concepts,and 62% errors of verb prepositions and all other 4 types of errors are mainly affected by L2-based concepts.Based on the above findings,this study puts forward the following suggestions for the teaching of verb-noun collocations for Chinese college students:(1)Raising the awareness of collocation;(2)Introducing dictionaries and corpora into classroom teaching;(3)Increasing metacognition of English collocation production and use.