Study Of Verb-noun Collocation Errors In College English Writings From The Perspective Of Conceptual Transfer

Language transfer has been an important issue that the field of second language acquisition focuses on for a long time.(Ellis,2000,299)Transfer can be divided into different types according to different levels.From cognitive level transfer can be divided into language transfer,meaning transfer and conceptual transfer.In recent years with the theoretical breakthroughs in the study of language transfer conceptual transfer has become one of the latest development directions of language transfer.Before conceptual transfer scholars mainly focus on superficial language phenomena.The study of conceptual transfer transcends superficial language phenomena.It examines language transfer at the interface of language and cognition---conceptual level.(Kellerman,1995)Verb-Noun collocation has been a hot topic in the study of second language acquisition for many years.It is a difficult point for Chinese students to study.According to the statistics of Chinese learner English corpus,“of all the speech mistakes,collocation errors are the sixth place in the speech error frequency table”(Yang Huizhong,2005,12).The appearing proportion of Verb-Noun collocation errors is the first.Therefore the paper studies Verb-Noun collocation errors in college English writings from the perspective of conceptual transfer.The paper uses corpus method,as well as quantitative and qualitative methods.The research corpus is two sub-corpora choosing from Chinese Learner English Corpus,including the low-grade English majors and high-grade English majors,that is St5 and St6.The writer uses the research tool Antconc3.3.5 to extract Verb-Noun collocation errors that appeared in the students' writings.There are three research questions in the paper:(1)How many classifications are there in the Verb-Noun collocation errors of college English writings?(2)What results in the Verb-Noun collocation errors of college English writings?(3)What suggestions can be given to improve learners' collocation competence? The results show that: firstly,according to the classifications of Verb-Noun collocation errors made by Nesselhauf,the paper classifies the Verb-Noun collocation errors into six categories,which are errors in verbs,errors in nouns,errors in usage,errors in prepositions,errors in determiners and errors in structures.Secondly,the paper uses the basic viewpoints of conceptual transfer----three types of concepts,which are L1-based concepts,shared concepts and L2-based concepts in compound conceptual representation system,to explain he reasons leading to the Verb-Noun collocation errors.Finally,aiming at the phenomenon,which English majors made Verb-Noun collocation errors,the author gives some suggestions forthe second language learners to strengthen their collocation awareness and increase their input of L2-based concepts and the depth of searching words.These suggestions will help them improve their collocation competence and second language proficiency.