A Corpus-based Study On The Collocation Behavior Of Have By Chinese English-majors

Have as one of the most frequently used verbs is in fact a complex word. It has various meanings. Firstly it can be used as an auxiliary verb to collocate with past participles expressing the perfect tense. Besides, it can be used as a main verb to collocate with various nouns or with certain words forming a habitual collocation. And in reality incorrect collocations of have, such as have sick, are often found in Chinese college English learners'writings.Therefore, the present research is to investigate Chinese English majors'collocation behavior of have on the basis of Interlanguage contrastive analysis and error analysis. Using the subsection St5 & St6 of Chinese Learners English Corpus (CLEC) representing Stage 1 (intermediate level) and Stage 2(high level) of Chinese English majors respectively, and British National Corpus (BNC) samples, it aims to find out English majors'weaknesses and the differences between inter-mediate level and high level English majors in using have. In this thesis the collocations of have are firstly summarized on the basis of previous studies of have. Subsequently the analysis is made to compare the use of have between BNC samples and the subsection of CLEC and identify their differences and the weaknesses of Chinese English majors in this respect. The result shows that English majors overuse have compared with native speakers while no significant differences exist between the two levels of English majors. In addition, from the perspective of the richness of its collocates, high level English majors show stronger ability than inter-mediate level learners. However, they commit almost the same errors as inter-mediate learners in using certain collocation types. Finally the investigation into the incorrect collocation of have in St5 and St6 indicates that language transfer is a vital factor for the misuses of the collocations of have; besides, overgeneralization and ignorance of collocation restrictions also lead to the deviant production of the collocations.Based on the above conclusions, some pedagogical implications are offered. The Chinese learners' awareness of collocations should be enhanced. Collocations can be better learned with reference to the Chinese language. More attention should be paid to the mastery of the collocations of common words, and in order to expand the Chinese learners' collocational knowledge, they should be encouraged to use as many collocations of a word as possible. In addition, it is highly necessary to utilize corpus in the teaching process, such as utilizing target language corpus in the teaching process and constructing a learners' corpus to analyze their interlanguage.