Transfer Theory And V-N Collocation Errors Analysis In CET4 Writings

V-N Collocations are posing great difficulty to L2 learners. As a result, such grammatically or semantically Chinese-featured improper expressions as *arrive the place<573>,*forget return home<72>,*eat lunch <316>and so on often crop up in Chinese learners'English writings. So far, researches in this aspect are not yet able to give out sufficient discussion about these errors and their causes for the sake of the combinational characteristics of collocation to enrich study on V-N collocation. Herein, this dissertation makes a CET4 writings-based analysis by specifying error types in V-N collocation and their relative statistic distribution in order to find the role played by L1 transfer in V-N collocation errors, its specific display, the relation between learners'overall writing competence and transfer-caused V-N collocation errors and conclude the research with some pedagogical suggestions. From 150 writings (50 from 3-5 scores, 50 from 6-8 scores, 50 from 9-11 scores)sampled in CET4 writings, 304 V-N collocation errors are collected on the basis of the patterns: Vt+N(Vt+N+N/V+V-ing): change one's mind(pass my brother a ball/go swimming);Vi+Prep+N: arrive at the destination, come to his rescue;V+N+Prep+N/V+(N)+to+V+N: prevent the crop from the rain/stop to help him. Excel & SPSS statistics show that:1) Errors in V-N co-occurrence prevail awfully over pattern errors, which implies that transfer has greater negative effect on semantic relation than on grammatical frameworks in V-N collocation.2) The ability to handle a proper verb is overwhelmingly below the mark, as far as all the error types are concerned, which suggests that the negative effect of transfer on semantic relation is comparatively focused on Verb errors.3) In the respect of pattern or grammatical errors, the poor handling of Preps or the particle To and unfamiliarity with conventional English structures in V-N collocation is greatly in evidence, which suggests the influence from the existent L1 grammatical frameworks.4) V-N collocation competences of learners are in direct proportion to their overall performances in writing, which implies less competent learners are more vulnerable to transfer in V-N collocation.Supported by statistic findings and L1 transfer theory from Contrastive Analysis (CA), Error Analysis (EA) and Interlanguage (an offshoot of error analysis), this dissertation not only proves that 258 errors are attributed to translation-featured L1 transfer by restructuring L1/L2 versions of wrong cases from a contrastive view, but also finds that learners of greater competence in writings would suffer less from L1 transfer in V-N collocation. In order to get over difficulties of English V-N collocations and threats from L1 negative transfer, the research proposes to contrastively emphasize those marked L2 collocations which show more or less non-equivalence to their Chinese counterparts semantically and syntactically.