A Study On Adjective-noun Collocation Errors In Senior High School Students’ English Writings From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

Collocation is an important issue in contemporary linguistics,the competence of which is regarded as an important criterion for effective language communication.Since Firth,a representative of the London School,put forward the concept of “collocation” in the 1950 s,many scholars at home and abroad have made a lot of research in this field.Studies have found that many English learners use grammatically correct sentences that are not acceptable to native speakers.In recent years,with the rise of corpus linguistics,lexical collocation studies based on learners’ corpora have flourished at home and abroad.Among them,there are a huge number of lexical collocation studies based on the Chinese Learner English Corpus,most of which,however,focus on verb-noun collocation errors.However,the error frequency of adjective-noun collocation is only second to that of verb-noun collocation in the Chinese Learner English Corpus.In addition,previous studies focus more on collocation errors of high-level learners but pay little attention to collocation errors committed by senior high school students.Therefore,the adjective-noun collocation errors produced by senior high school English learners can’t be ignored.Although many scholars at home and abroad have begun to conduct a large number of studies on the analysis of adjective-noun collocation errors,there are few studies that try to make an in-depth analysis of adjective-noun collocation errors from a new perspective.Based on the above statements,this paper attempts to analyze the adjective-noun collocation errors of Chinese senior high school English learners from the perspective of conceptual transfer.In this study,Ant Conc3.2.4w software is adopted to extract the adjective-noun collocation errors from the Chinese Learner English Corpus,which is used as an analytical corpus to answer the following three questions.(1)How many kinds of and what’s the characteristics of adjective-noun collocation errors can be identified in senior high school students’ English writings?(2)In the dimension of conceptual transfer,what are the reasons for these kinds of adjective-noun collocation errors among senior high school students?(3)Which methods can effectively improve the adjective-noun collocation competence of senior high school students?The results show that: 1.The adjective-noun collocation errors in the sub-corpus ST2 can be divided into 9 categories:(1)misuse of adjectives in the position of attributive or predicative;(2)misuse of words with the same root;(3)misuse of synonyms in adjective-noun collocation;(4)overgeneralization of the adjective-noun collocation rules;(5)adjective-noun collocation errors caused by language transfer;(6)wrongly-tagged adjective-noun collocations in CLEC;(7)misuse of the adjectives or nouns whose meanings are overlapped with each other;(8)misuse of word-formation in adjective-noun collocation;(9)the identifiable adjective-noun collocation errors.2.The study finds that the third type of error,misuse of synonyms in adjective-noun collocation,occurs most frequently,followed by the misuse of words with the same root.Misuse of word-formation occurs least frequently in adjective-noun collocation errors.3.Due to the development of the concepts of the first language and the second language in the process of learning English,learners have formed L1-based concepts,shared concepts and L2-based concepts,and learners’ adjective-noun collocation errors can be attributed to the misuse of these three concepts.Based on the above analysis and research results,this paper proposes three methods to improve learners’ adjective-noun collocation competence,namely,attaching importance to the collocation learning and accumulation,introducing the corpus of the target language and implementing conceptual teaching methods.From the perspective of conceptual transfer,this paper makes a tentative analysis of the adjective-noun collocation errors of Chinese English learners,which helps teachers and learners to understand the root reasons for English adjective-noun collocation errors more clearly.At the same time,this paper also puts forward substantive suggestions to help learners improve their vocabulary collocation competence more effectively.