A Corpus-based Study On Colligation Of The Delexical Verb Get By Chinese Non-English Majors

The present paper focuses on colligation of delexical verb get used by Chinesenon-English majors. Based on Interlanguage Theory, Error Analysis, ContrastiveInterlanguage Analysis and Ringbom’s proposal of the four types of get colligation(get+noun, get+adjective/past participle, get+adverb, get+to do), this papercompares get colligation in writings respectively extracted from two sub-corpora St3and St4in CLEC and BNC written corpus, with the purpose of answering threequestions:(1) Do Chinese non-English majors tend to overuse or underuse delexicalverb get?(2) To what extent does the learner corpus deviate from the native corpus interms of get colligations?(3) What factors are responsible for the errors?The result shows that (1) both CET4and CET6students overuse significantlyget and two types of get colligation—get+noun, get+adjective/past participle. Theyboth overuse get+adverb to an insignificant degree. CET4students significantlyoveruse get to do due to a set title Getting to Know the World outside the Campus inSt3and CET6students significantly underuse it.(2) Typical collocates are analyzedin three types of colligations, namely, get+noun, get adjective/past participle, get+adverb, the result shows that both CET4and CET6students significantly deviatefrom British native speakers although there is low growth in using get colligation.(3)The possible factors causing these errors are interlingual factors (L1interference) andintralingual factors: ignorance of collocational restrictions and false concepthypothesized. The present paper also puts forward three pedagogicalimplications—increasing awareness of delexical verb colligation, increasingcolligation input and output and applying corpora in language teaching and learning.