Corpus-based Research On The Adjective-Noun Collocational Errors In English Writings By English Majors

Firth, the foremost representative of the London School put forward the notion of collocation in the 1950s firstly; up to now, many domestic and overseas scholars have done considerable researches on it. Recently, with the rise of corpus linguistics, a large number of studies on collocations based on corpora have emerged; however, most of these researches paid attention to the verb-noun collocations. Actually, adjective-noun collocation also plays an important role in SLA/FLA, which should not be overlooked. The solution to adjective-noun collocation problems will be of great help to both language learning and language teaching. Thus, the attention of this thesis is fixed on the discussion about the adjective-noun collocational errors in English writings by English majors based on corpus, with the purpose to provide reliable evidence for English teaching of China and look for a new practical way of promoting the writing of Chinese students.Based on the purpose of present research, two sub-corpora, st5 and st6, are selected from CLEC, and then all the cc4 data are retrieved from st5 and st6. More importantly, the thesis makes an attempt to find out the major types of these errors and the major underlying causes; finally, the conclusion can be summarized as following:The adjective-noun collocational errors in English writings by English majors can be classified into two main types, namely interlingual errors and intralingual errors; moreover, the former type of errors can be further divided into the errors resulting from negative transference and the errors resulting from cultural differences; the latter type of errors can be further described as the errors resulting from violating grammatical or semantic restrictions, the errors resulting from ignorance of semantic prosody and the errors resulting from the difficulties in synonyms. It should be pointed out that the causes for adjective-noun collocational errors are very complicated. Some errors may result from one single factor, but sometimes the error results from several factors.To help English majors to commit less adjective-noun collocational errors, three proposals are put forward in this thesis. Firstly, the integrated teaching approach including semantic approach, lexical approach and grammatical approach to collocation should be adopted. Secondly, the corpora should be applied in classroom by teachers for enhancing the learners'input. Finally, in order to minimize the negative transference of native language, the strategy of distinguishing the differences between target language and native language concerning the collocations should be adopted by teachers.In conclusion, the research on adjective-noun collocation in the thesis is of great practical significance, which provides us with a better understanding of the common adjective-noun collocational errors found in the writings by English majors and the items which we should pay attention in the future foreign language learning and teaching. It is hoped that this thesis will particularly contribute to promoting the teaching of English writing in China.