A Corpus-Based Study Of English Learners’ Use Of Collocation,Semantic Prosody And Colligation Of Synonyms

Whether language expressions are idiomatic or not depends on the knowledge of collocation,semantic prosody and colligation.Traditional English teaching focuses on the vocabulary size at the cost of collocation,semantic prosody and colligation,which results in students’ inaccurate and unidiomatic expressions.This study chooses three pairs of synonyms including adjective synonyms SUITABLE and APPROPRIATE,verbal synonyms FORBID and PROHIBIT and nominal synonyms RESULT and CONSEQUENCE and compares their use in collocation,semantic prosody and colligation in CLEC with those in BNC,intending to probe English learners’ problems like misuse,unidiomaticity and overuse or underuse.We hope this study can offer some help to the teaching of synonyms and raise both teachers and students’ awareness of corpus-assisted vocabulary teaching and learning.Therefore,teachers can instruct and help students gradually approach the norm of target language level by employing data from corpora.With regard to collocation,firstly,collocates used by Chinese students differ greatly from those used by English native speakers,resulting in the unidiomaticity of collocations.Both English majors and non-English majors have the problem of unidiomaticity which can be attributed to students’ unfamiliarity with salient collocations.Besides,students tend to overuse some collocations which is the result of their deficiency of salient collocations in mind and monotony of target language output.Secondly,students always make word-for-word translation as a result of first language transfer.Thirdly,students are inclined to use simple and concrete collocates instead of complex and abstract ones as a result of their avoidance strategy,that is,to avoid error and ensure correctness.On semantic prosody,firstly,semantic prosody of synonyms in CLEC is in conflict with that in BNC.The semantic prosody of FORBID and CONSEQUENCE in CLEC is slightly in conflict with that in BNC and the semantic prosody of PROHIBIT in CLEC is obviously in conflict with that in BNC.The essential reason lies in students’ lack of semantic knowledge.Secondly,problems of semantic conflictand unidiomatic collocations lead to some unusual collocations and many interlanguage collocations.As far as colligation is concerned,firstly,colligation types used by students are unidiomatic.Secondly,colligation types used by students are not so abundant as those used by English native speakers.As colligation types are abstract grammatical forms of collocations,unidiomaticity and monotony of colligation types are the result of students’ deficiency of salient collocations.In fact,the fundamental reason of problems in collocations,semantic prosody and colligation lies in students’ de-contextualized way of vocabulary learning,so it is really necessary to apply corpus to classroom teaching and learning.This thesis provides three pieces of advice for corpus-assisted teaching.Firstly,the compilation of textbook should be based on large and authentic English native speakers’ corpora.Salient collocations,colligation types and semantic knowledge should be added into word list.Secondly,English teachers should have an easy access to corpora and tools for corpus analysis,thus they can combine corpus study into their language teaching.Thirdly,in the application of corpora in classroom,teachers can instruct students to summarize lexical chunks from large numbers of concordance lines.Corpus-based classroom teaching is not only interesting and highly efficient,but also helpful to cultivate students’ autonomous learning.