A PACCEL-Based Study Of "Verb+Noun" Collocation In C-E Translation

Collocation has attracted great interest of theoretical linguists, translation researchers and scholars in SLA (second language acquisition) fields since it was coined, and accordingly a number of collocationists have appeared, such as Cowie (1978,1981), Sinclair (1966,1991) and Stubbs (1996,1991). Large-scale corpuses and automatic extraction softwares have supported collocation study with more data, which takes great advantage of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Therefore, corpus-based studies of collocation have been vigorously conducted, and semantic prosody (SP) is one of the soundest findings. By far, there have emerged considerable findings on collocation from the lexical, semantic and grammar-integrated perspectives. The study of SP is concerned about monolingual words or phrases (mainly English) in the corpuses, as well as differences between native speakers and Chinese English learners.Although some findings have been achieved, the exploration on this issue still needs further improvements. First of all, collocation, an indispensable part in language learning, has gained widespread concerns and attraction, and SP "dictates the general environment which constrains the preferential choices of the node item"(Partington,2004:151). A combination of collocation and SP theories has been able to contribute to revealing the characteristics of vocabulary. Secondly, most studies on collocation in China are based on Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and have covered learners at different levels. The nodes of these studies are "Verb+Noun"(VN) collocation,"Adjective+Noun" collocation and "Noun+Noun" collocation used in writings by English learners in China. The results based on CLEC have revealed general characteristics and specific usages of collocation. However, samples in CLEC are composed of learners’ writings and the results have shown their productive knowledge in the process of writing. Therefore, data in CLEC cannot be used to discuss collocation usages and errors in the process of translation. Finally, a verb, the main component of any sentence, is a major word for conveying meaning in English. The researches based on CLEC have shown that more than50%errors made by Chinese learners are VN collocation errors (Gui&Yang,2003:712), so it is of great necessity to investigate usages and errors of VN collocation in C-E translation.This study is based on PACCEL-written, one subcorpus of PACCEL, and conducted with both qualitative and quantitative analysis. By taking zhan4sheng4as the node, this study investigates the translation texts of three VN collocations—zhan4sheng4luo4hou4, zhan4sheng4yu2mei4and zhan4sheng4xie2e4. By comparing the VN collocations of four high-frequency verbs—DEFEAT, WIN, CONQUER and OVERCOME in PACCEL and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), this study aims to find out whether English majors in China have an awareness of collocation and SP and whether they are competent in translating Chinese VN collocations into English. The classification of errors’ types reflects the causes of errors. Then implications are made for collocation and translation teaching and learning.The comparison of the two corpuses shows that:firstly, English majors have awareness of collocation and SP and are able to properly use the negative SP of OVERCOME, but they have not grasped the SP characteristics of other three high-frequency words—DEFEAT, WIN and CONQUER; secondly,39.3%English majors are able to translate the three VN collocations appropriately and the rest make errors in terms of semantics, collocation and grammar; thirdly, the causes lie in the ignorance of SP, negative L1transfer, misuse of near synonyms, ignorance of collocation restriction and ignorance of semantic restriction.Based on the data in two corpuses, this study discusses collocation and SP awareness, classification of errors and causes of errors, and provides translation strategies and suggestions for vocabulary and translation learning and teaching. It is proposed that, in learners’ acquisition and translation of English vocabulary as well as teachers’ teaching of vocabulary and translation, learners and teachers both should have a strong awareness of collocation and SP of English vocabulary, especially verbs and nouns, and lay great emphasis on the mastery of it.