A Study Of Verb-noun Collocation Errors In Chinese Nun-English Majors’ Writings From The Perspective Of Mother Tongue Negative Transfer

Collocation is an important research subject in the field of modern linguistics. Many scholars both abroad and at home have stressed the significance of collocation and have conducted a large number of researches. Many previous studies focused on the definition, classification and influences of verb-noun collocation on the experimental basis. However, the author figures out that there are not many studies of verb-noun collocation errors explored with the help of corpora, and few have studied from the perspective of mother tongue negative transfer.This thesis analyzes and studies verb-noun collocation errors of Chinese non-English majors on the basis of two sub-corpora ST3and ST4in CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) under the guidance of mother tongue negative transfer. Besides, with the help of corpus software Antconc (3.2.1) and SPSS (17.0), this research discusses the following four questions.(1) Are there any significant differences in the frequencies of verb-noun collocation errors between Chinese non-English majors from ST3and ST4?(2) What are the typical categories of verb-noun collocation errors committed by Chinese non-English majors in their writings?(3) What are the possible reasons of these errors explained from the perspective of mother tongue negative transfer?(4) What are the implications of this research to foreign language learning and teaching?This thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction of the research background, the significance and objectives of this research. In addition, it lays out the overall structure of the thesis. The second chapter, made up of three sections, is the literature review. First, it concentrates on definition and classification of negative transfer. Second, it explains definition and classification of collocations. It then briefly introduces verb-noun collocation. Third, it reviews researches on mother tongue negative transfer theory, describes previous studies of verb-noun collocation errors both abroad and at home and of verb-noun collocation errors based on CLEC. The third chapter is devoted to the research methodology. It involves research questions, research design and procedures, and data collection. The fourth chapter demonstrates the results and discussions of the research. This chapter starts from analyzing whether there are any significant differences in the frequencies of CC3type of error in sub-corpora ST3and ST4. What’s more, the author classifies all those verb-noun collocation errors. The next step is to explain the causes of these verb-noun collocation error categories from the perspective of mother tongue negative transfer. Finally, this chapter presents tentative pedagogical implications and provides some suggestions for further foreign language teaching. The fifth chapter brings together the major findings of the research. At the same time, it discusses the limitations of this study.The main findings of this research can be summarized as follows. In the first place, the author finds out-that there exist significant differences in the frequencies of verb-noun collocation errors committed by students at two learning stages of ST3and ST4. In the next place, collocation errors can be classified into four categories, namely, syntactic errors, lexical errors, semantic errors and grammatical errors, which can be then subdivided into eleven smaller classes. Finally, this thesis explains the causes of these errors from the perspective of mother tongue negative transfer in five aspects unfamiliarity with semantic prosody of English words, unfamiliarity with chunks of English words, ignorance of different use range of English and Chinese verbs, differences in the transitivity of English and Chinese verbs, and word to word translation.This study has certain practical implications on foreign language teaching. First of all, it helps teachers to focus on the depth of vocabularies students having already known in the process of teaching. Next, teachers can help students to get rid of the mother tongue interference in learning foreign language. Third, it is advantageous for students to raise their collocation consciousness. Last but one, it helps teachers to point out the mistakes students make in collocation and to use teaching approaches to help students make correct collocation. Finally, teachers can provide more native language input for learners.