A Corpus-based Analysis Of College Students' Adjective-noun Collocations

Collocation is one of the most important researches in linguistics and applied linguistics. Collocation competence is one of the most significant embodiments in language ability between the native speakers and EFL learners. Theorists and practitioners in teaching define and explore collocation and collocation learning methods from different perspectives in language teaching and related fields, revealing the importance and characteristics of collocation in language learning. A series of researching collocation methods comes into being in corpus linguistics. As corpus linguistics is one of the mainstream research methods, the importance of collocation research based on corpus is increasingly revealed.The present study is based on corpus and aims to investigate the use of three synonymous adjective collocations (common, ordinary, average) and two noun collocations ( role, tea ) by Chinese EFL learners. Meanwhile, the Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) approach is adopted. Through the comparison between the sub-corpora St3, St4, St5, St6 in CLEC and the native corpora ( FLOB, BNC) and Chinese Corpus (LCMC), some characteristics of the adjective-noun by the Chinese college students are presented in terms of quantity, the degree of appropriateness and typicality and inappropriate use.The study shows that the Chinese college students have the tendency to overuse the adjective "common", but underuse the nouns "role, tea". They produce fewer collocation types than the native speakers. Furthermore, the study finds that there are few adjective and noun collocations both shared by the Chinese college students and native speakers, which also differ in T-score and MI score. Evidence in this study also points to these four major characteristics: semantic imprecision in the use of collocates, confusion of polysemous adjectives, constitution of synonymous adjectives, coexistence of overt nonnative-likeness and convert nonnative-likeness and semantic prosody inharmony. Based on the investigation on these five nodes adjective-noun collocations, the study analyzes that there are some possible factors affecting the acquisition of the collocations, such as, influence of the native language, confusion of synonyms, different mental lexicon between native speakers and Chinese college students, cultural differences. So the author believes that collocations should be paid more attention in language learning and teaching, and tries to provide some suggestions from the perspective of teachers, such as, raising learners' awareness of collocations in their teaching, using corpora, providing students with a large quantity of authentic and high-quality input, teaching knowledge of prosody properly, adopting the Corpus Query System to teaching word collocation and synonym analysis, employing English-Chinese parallel corpora.