A Study Of Adjective-noun Collocation In Writing By English Majors In Different Grades

Collocation and Error Analysis (EA) have always attracted much attention of linguists. In recentyears, researches on the combination of collocation and error analysis (EA) have become anincreasing concern. Although linguists and English teachers admit that collocational errors take up alarge proportion of productive errors in second language acquisition (SLA), adjective-noun (AN)collocation and adjective-noun collocational error (ANCE) do not receive sufficient attention. As amatter of fact, adjective-noun collocation competence of second language learners is insufficient.Based on the linguistic theory of collocation and error analysis (EA), this thesis investigates thecharacteristics of adjective-noun collocation used by English majors.120English majors fromfreshmen to seniors are participants in this paper. The findings are as follows:(1) The number and patterns of AN collocations both increase with the language level andlearning process, which shows a direct correlation. However, the types of AN collocations, mainlyfocusing on qualitative adjectives and classifying adjectives, are not in a variety.(2) The distribution and tendency of collocational error, unlike the tendentcy of AN collocations,do not increase with the language level and professional learning process. The whole tendency is justlike an inverted “V” for sophomores committing the most errors among the four grades.(3) This paper classifies the AN collocational errors into intralingual errors, interlingual errors,communicative strategy-based errors as well as induced errors. The causes are as follows: intralingualerrors mainly committed by freshmen and sophomores are caused by L1negative transfer; interlingualerrors mainly committed by juniors and seniors are caused by over-generalization, violatingcollocation restrictions, semantic prosody inharmony and semantic confusion; avoidance andteacher-and-material induction cause communicative strategy-based errors and induced errors.In accordance with the analysis, the author puts forward some constructive suggestions forcollocation teaching. First, teachers should teach collocations by using native corpora and collocationdictionary. Second, teachers should provide sufficient and high-quality materials to improve theircollocationability. Third, teachers should consciously raise students’ collocation awareness. Finally,teachers can adopt an integrated approach to teach collocations.