A Study Of Verb-Noun Collocation Errors Of Chinese College Non-English Majors

The present thesis reports an investigation of verb-noun collocation errors made by Chinese college non-English majors based on the two sub-corpora of CLEC, ST3 and ST4. ST3 is composed of writings of freshmen and sophomores of non-English majors, with a total number of 209,043 tokens and ST4 consists of writings of junior and senior non-English majors, with a total number of 212,855 tokens. We try to answer the following questions:(1) Compared with college freshmen and sophomores of non-English majors (ST3), is there any significant decrease or increase in the number of verb-noun collocation errors committed by junior and senior non-English majors (ST4)? What is the underlying implication?(2) What typical difficulties do Chinese EFL learners have in their production of verb-noun collocations?(3) What are the possible causes of these collocation errors?We compared the frequency of verb-noun collocation errors extracted from ST3 and ST4, and then analyzed the verb-noun collocation errors from the lexical, semantic and grammatical perspectives respectively. The major findings are: (1) Compared with freshmen and sophomores of non-English majors, there is no significant decrease in the number of verb-noun collocation errors committed by junior and senior non-English majors though the latter are assumed to have a better command of vocabulary. Their collocational competence does not parallel their vocabulary knowledge in second language acquisition. (2) College non-English majors do not pay enough attention to the arbitrariness or fixedness of collocations. They have problems with collocations concerning de-lexicalized verbs. Besides, Chinese learners tend to replace the verbs with their synonyms in lexical combinations, and thus infelicitous collocations are produced. (3) In the verb-noun collocations produced by Chinese learners, the semantic features of the verbs may clash with those of the nouns and collocation errors arise. Chinese learners also have a comparatively weak sense of semantic prosody. (4) When producing verb-noun collocations, Chinese college non-English majors still commit some, though not many, grammatical errors concerning prepositions, the number of nouns and the syntactic structure. (5) Chinese EFL learners commit collocation errors mainly because of their inadequate collocational knowledge and incomplete comprehension of word meanings. Yet this is not the whole picture. First language transfer and communicative strategies both contribute a lot to the verb-noun collocation errors committed by Chinese learners.We also make several suggestions for collocation teaching: (1) An Integrated approach should be adopted in the teaching of collocations; (2) L1 influence should be minimized through increasing collocation input and making comparison between Chinese and English; (3) It's advisable to apply corpora in language learning and teaching; (4) Teachers should encourage output of collocations in student' writing.