A Collocational Study On Delexicalized High-Frequency Verbs In Interlanguage Of Cems

One of the main developments in English language teaching (ELT) during the last two decades has been a growing awareness of the importance of lexical collocation in language teaching and learning. Collocation facilitates both oral communication and writing, in terms of smooth, accuracy and idiomaticity.Sinclair & Renouf (1988) put forward that one of the main features of English language is the extensive use of delexicalized words. Therefore, the study of the delexicalized high-frequency verb (DHFV) collocations has significant importance in the study of collocation. So far, however, few researches have been conducted on the DHFV collocations produced by Chinese English majors (CEMs). And some researches are not based on authentic language data, or on comparison between the mother tongue (MT) corpus and the target language (TL) corpus,thus the results are often not very much convincing. By adopting a corpus-based Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) approach, the present study compares the collocations of get, make and take available for the present study in St5 and St6, two sub-corpora of the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) with those in the corpus of BROWN. Through the comparison, the present study aims to address the following questions: 1) What are the patterns of the three DHFV collocations produced by CEMs at two different proficiency levels, as compared with native speakers? 2) What are the developmental patterns of the three DHFV collocations? 3) What are the underlying causes for the collocational errors? 4) What strategies do they adopt in composing DHFV collocations? 5) What possible pedagogical implications can be offered to English as a foreign language (EFL)/ English as a second language (ESL) teaching and learning?This thesis is both a quantitative and qualitative study based on the theories of Contrastive Analysis (CA), Error Analysis (EA), Interlanguage (IL) and Collocation. Statistical tools of Wordsmith, Excel and SPSS are utilized to calculate all the noun collocates of the three DHFVs available for the present study from both CELC and BROWN.The study finds that: 1) Compared with native speakers, CEMs, in the St5 and St6 groups, display a salient tendency of overusing the collocations of the three DHFVs, however, they produce fewer collocational types with narrow semantic range. 2) Though some of the collocations of the three DHFVs produced by CEMs are shared by native speakers, they are strikingly different in the Z-score and MI-score, which show the typicality of collocations. 3) A further investigation indicates that a large proportion of collocations of the three DHFVs produced by CEMs are typical in the register of speech rather than in writing. 4) The cross-sectional comparisons find the signs of progression in terms of competence in the DHFV collocations of CEMs at two different proficiency levels. However, the degree of progression is not significant with the increase of proficiency levels.The analysis also shows the underlying causes for the DHFV collocational errors, they are: a) L1 interference, a major cause for the collocational errors of this kind; b) Lack of sufficient vocabulary knowledge; c) Overgeneralization; d) Ignorance of collocational restrictions. And the strategies of repetition and avoidance are preferred by CEMs in the St5 and St6 groups in the production of the DHFV collocations.The findings enable us to propose some pedagogical implications for EFL/ESL teaching and learning: a) Raising awareness of collocations to enhance the accuracy of writing; b) Applying corpora in language teaching and learning to have a luxury exposure to the native language; c) Teaching and learning with reference to Chinese, to avoid collocational errors more efficiently; d) Teaching and learning the collocations of common words, to accelerate vocabulary acquisition.