A Corpus-based Study Of Chinese College Students' "adjective+noun" Collocation

This thesis is a comparative study of the"adjective +noun"collocation between the native speakers and Chinese college students, It is based on the learners'corpus CLEC, with the natives'corpus LOCNESS as the reference corpus. The key words chosen to be investigatged are two adjectives—"little"and"small", which are synonymous in meaning. It aims to make a deep and precise investigation of them in"adjective +noun"collocation, and intends to find answers to the following questions:⑴What are the general features of Chinese EFL learners'use of adjectives in"adjective-noun"collocations? i.e. how is Chinese EFL learners'use of adjective-noun collocations different from or similar to that of native speakers?⑵Are there any differences between different proficiency levels of Chinese EFL learners? What are their developmental trends?⑶What kinds of errors are made by Chinese EFL learners in using the two synonyms in"adjective+noun"collocations? What has caused the misuses of the synonyms in the process? The study uses Antconc3.2.1w as the tool to extract the key words from LOCNESS and the sub-corpora of CLEC—St3 and St6, and then Microsoft Excel 2003 is adopted to calculate the MI score and Z-score of the collocates,thus the typical collocations of the two adjectives are decided. Furthermore, the applications of both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis are combined to make analyses of the data to draw conclusions.The results of the analyses indicate that the Chinese L2 learners'usages of the two adjectives are different from the natives. As to"adjective +noun"collocation, the collocates used by the natives are more various. In addition, Chinese L2 learners'understandings of the semantic meanings of the key words are incomplete. It is easier for the learners to produce collocations that are grammatically correct, but sound weird to the native speakers, which is mainly interfered by their mother tongue.At the end of the thesis, some pedagogical implcations are mentioned to help improve vocabulary teaching and learning, especially of collocations. Though it is carried out at full stretch, there are some limitations to come over in the future studies.