A Corpus-Based Study On The Presentation Of Adjective-noun Collocation In English-Chinese Learner's Dictionaries

The learner's vocabulary collocation ability which has become an important indicator to measure learners' foreign language proficiency is of importance to the accuracy and fluency of English expression.Recently,there were many studies on lexical collocation,but mainly focused on Verb-noun collocation.Few researches have been made on the adjective which is the third largest lexical category in English.Therefore,this paper will focus on the adjective-noun collocation and explore the problems of Chinese learners' adjective-noun collocation so as to provide a certain help for the better presentation of adjective-noun collocation in the English-Chinese Learner's Dictionaries(ECLDs).In order to achieve the goal,two corpora will be employed in the present study,i.e.,the EFL learner corpus CLEC as an observed corpus and the native English corpus COCA as the reference corpus.The explicit problems of Chinese learners in the production of adjective-noun collocation and the reasons for these problems will be explored by Error Analysis(EA),which can be mainly attributed to the negative transfer of mother tongue,overlooking the collocation restriction,neglecting the semantic prosody,exploiting redundancy and communication strategy.And the author also finds the overuse of general adjectives by the contrastive interlanguage analysis.In addition,this paper will compare and analyze two present ECLDs in terms of presenting adjective-noun collocation so as to investigate whether the presentation can effectively help learners avoid these errors.This study has shown that the present ECLDs still have certain defects.1)lack of systematic error warning;2)lack of necessary collocation in synonym analysis;3)ignoring the specific needs of Chinese learners for collocation to some degree.Finally,based on the above research results,this paper proposes some suggestions and models under the guidance of the user-centered principle.Selecting collocation based on two corpora: Chinese English learners' corpus and English native corpus;adding necessary typical collocations to help learners discriminate synonyms;providing more error warnings to avoid L1 interference and the influence of semantic prosody and setting up columns to avoid the overuse of general adjectives may provide some inspiration for improving the way of presentation of adjective-noun collocation in the ECLDs,making it more in line with the needs of Chinese learners.