A Corpus-Based Study On Noun-Noun Collocation Errors By Chinese College English Learners From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

Undoubtedly,collocation is an indispensable part of language acquisition,as any language is by no means an arbitrary pile of words whereas it must follow certain internal mechanism restricts and be subject to the constraints of external factors.Under such circumstance,the mastery of sufficient collocation is vital for L2 learners' realization of native-like competence.However,Chinese EFL learners present an unsatisfactory weakness in the mastery of noun-noun collocations.Noun-noun collocation errors rank the second among all other types of collocation errors in Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC),but few researches have ever been engaged in exploring it.Based on the foundation of CLEC,the research is devoted to probing into the noun-noun collocation errors under the theoretical framework of Conceptual Transfer with the aims of answering the following three questions:(1)What types of errors do the college English learners exhibit in the use of the noun-noun collocation?(2)Compared with certain Chinese grammatical and lexicalized concepts,are these types of errors caused by conceptual transfer?(3)What is the correlation between college English learners' proficiency and their conceptual transfer errors in noun-noun collocations?This study is an empirical research which is conducted on the basis of corpus involving both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis.The result reveals that noun-noun collocation errors are classified into three major categories which can be further divided into seven sub-categories.Additionally,Chinese lexicalized and grammatical conceptual systems do exert a negative influence on Chinese college English learners.Influenced by some similarities and differences in lexicalized and grammatical conceptual systems of English and Chinese,Chinese college English learners can't have a good mastery of noun-noun collocations.It is found that noun-noun collocation errors are mainly caused by the neglect of the different conceptual systems between English and Chinese,which leads to mis-use of L1-based concepts,mis-construction of shared concepts and L2-based concepts.To some extent,intermediate level of the non-English majors commit more noun-noun collocation errors than advanced high level of English majors and there are significant differences between the number of conceptual transfer errors and the increase of learners' English proficiency.The research has an endeavor to promote the studies of the conceptual transfer hypothesis by supplying the proofs of exploring linguistic phenomenon of the second language at the cognitive level and enrich the theory of language transfer.