A Corpus-Based Study On Verb-Noun Collocations In Chinese Learners' English Writing

Collocation has usually been regarded as a core of English,which receives more and more attention by linguists in recent years.Nattinger and Decarrico(1992)and Wray(2002)held the view that the language output of English native speakers is not only a single word,but also collocations and phrases.Besides,the importance of English verb-noun collocations has been recognized by a great number of scholars.Numerous researchers,such as Sinclair and Yoon,have carried out lots of studies on Chinese English learners' verb-noun collocation,adopting the corpus method.However,most previous studies used the ready-made corpora which lack representativeness in terms of the timeliness of research materials.What is worse,genres of materials included in the learners' corpora are not enough,which makes the corpus less representative than it is supposed to be.In addition,in the previous studies,there is a lack of detailed explanations for the occurrence of verb-noun collocation errors.The present study aims to carry out a corpus-based analysis of the verb-noun collocations in Chinese learners' English writing.For this purpose,this study utilized two self-built corpora of Chinese learners and a corpus of young adult native speakers of English.As for the two self-built corpora,they were the Basic Chinese Learner Corpus of Written English(BCLCoWE)and the Advanced Chinese Learner Corpus of Written English(ACLCoWE)which consisted of about 30000 words,including 80 argumentative,80 narrative,and 80 descriptive essays in each corpus.Concerning the corpus of English native speakers,Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(LOCNESS)was selected.This study retrieved the 30 most frequently occurring nouns in LOCNESS and in the Chinese learners' corpus,created concordances for these nouns and extracted the related verb-noun collocations.Subsequently,this study investigated the differences in the use of well-formed verb-noun collocations between Chinese learners and native speakers,and between the different levels of Chinese learners,with the purpose of knowing the current situation of verb-noun collocations of Chinese learners.Finally,on the basis of the theories of language transfer and Error Analysis,in terms of interlingual errors,intralingual errors and communication strategy-based errors,the explanations for the recurrent collocation errors were given.Then,possible factors affecting the collocation output of Chinese learners were analyzed.Finally,some pedagogical implications on collocation teaching for English teachers were pointed out.The three questions to be addressed are as follows:1.What are the differences between native speakers and Chinese English learners in the number of well-formed verb-noun collocations in their writing?2.What are the differences between Chinese English learners at different levels of second language proficiency in the accuracy of verb-noun collocations in their writing?3.What is the distribution of deviant collocations of Chinese English learners at different levels of second language proficiency in their writing?Through the analysis of data,the study came to the following conclusions:firstly,it was revealed that the well-formed verb-noun collocations produced by the Chinese learners in their writing were much fewer than those by the native speakers.And even the advanced Chinese learners produced fewer collocations than native speakers.Besides,by comparing the frequencies of well-formed verb-noun collocations occurring in each of the Chinese learners' corpora,as compared to the basic learners,the advanced learners produced more verb-noun collocations than the basic learners.But there still exists an obvious gap between the advanced learners and the English native speakers.Moreover,it was found that both of the two levels of Chinese learners produced a considerable number of deviant collocations in their writing,representing almost a third proportion in the total number of verb-noun collocations.An important finding was that not only was there no decrease in the number of deviant collocations with a growth in learners' second language proficiency,but also there was an inverse relationship between learners' second language proficiency and correctness of verb-noun collocations.In terms of the causes resulting in deviant collocations,the following explanations were analyzed.Firstly,because of the cultural differences between Chinese and English,the negative transfer of learners' mother tongue may be the main factor resulting in the deviant collocations.Secondly,the lack of sufficient collocation knowledge of Chinese learners and the fact that teachers and students pay less attention to the verb-noun collocations may be also the important factors causing collocation errors.Based on this research,some suggestions to English instructors were given in this study.In class,teachers can place emphasis on the study and usage of verb-noun collocations and provide the students with more chances to use collocations in real language environments.Besides,in the process of teaching,the instructors can attach more importance to explaining the differences between English and Chinese collocations to students.In addition,the teachers can employ such tools as word concordances and professional collocation dictionaries to facilitate their collocation teaching,so that the collocation competence of the learners will be improved.