A Corpus-based Study On Verb-noun Collocation Errors By Chinese English Majors From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

At present, it is commonly acknowledged that collocation competence is of great value to increase learners'native-like fluency. However, Chinese EFL learners show a great weakness in the appropriate use of collocation, especially verb-noun collocation. Conceptual transfer is a recent notion proposed by Pavlenko (1998) in an attempt to account for language transfer in the level of concepts. Under the framework of this theory, the present study is devoted to probing into the verb-noun collocation errors in the writings of Chinese English majors extracted from two sub-corpora of CLEC with the aim of answering the following three questions: (1) Does verb-noun collocation competence of Chinese college English majors develop with the increase of their language proficiency? (2) What are the distribution and classification of verb-noun collocation errors in ST5 and ST6? (3) What are the underlying causes of these errors from the perspective of conceptual transfer?The result reveals (1) collocation competence of Chinese college English majors doesn't grow with the increase of their language proficiency. As a matter of fact, junior and senior English majors commit more verb-noun collocation errors than freshman and sophomore English majors, and the difference between their error frequencies is statistically significant according to the chi-square test. (2) verb-noun collocation errors can be classified into three major categories, namely, lexical errors, semantic errors, and grammatical errors, in which the errors are further divided into eight sub-categories. The distribution of each category in ST5 and ST6 reveals that Chinese English majors have greater difficulties in the mastery of the arbitrariness of collocation, and the semantic restriction than in the acquisition of grammar. (3) Based on the compound conceptual system in conceptual theory, the underlying causes can be traced back to the level of concepts, that is, mis-mobilization of L1-based concepts in the production of L2, mis-construction of shared concepts, mis-construction of L2-based concepts.On the basis of the above findings, some pedagogical implications are offered: (1) Both teachers and learners should heighten their awareness of the importance of collocation. (2) Apart from learning collocation in classroom, learners should increase their collocation input by reading authentic English magazines, newspapers, or modern literatures. (3) Learners are also suggested to look up English-English dictionaries to explore the depth of words, since a large amount of errors are caused by their ignorance of semantic restriction of words. (4) Learners should raise their metaphorical awareness of both Chinese and English to avoid matching Chinese metaphor with English words mistakenly.