Chinese Learners' And Native Speakers' Use Of English Adjective-adverb Homomorphs

The classification of English word classes has always been a significant issue in language research,and the phenomenon of multiple class membership is one of the hotpots and difficulties in research.The English adjective-adverb homomorph refers to a word with both adjective and adverb parts of speech,which is widely used.Previous studies have summarized adjective-adverb homormorphs from the perspective of morphology or lexicography,but few studies have examined the characteristics,or differences and similarities,of native speakers and Chinese learners in their use of such English words.Thus,following the corpus-based research method and CIA framework,this research selected the written sub-corpus of BNC and WECCL 2.0 as the target corpora to explore native speakers' and Chinese learners' characteristics of using English adjective-adverb homomorphs,in terms of frequency distribution,collocation and colligation,with very,long,little,right,past as examples.The research was intended to answer 3 specific questions:(1)How do native speakers use adjective-adverb homomorphs?(2)How do Chinese learners use adjective-adverb homomorphs?(3)What are the differences and similarities between native speakers and Chinese learners in their use of adjective-adverb homomorphs?In order to answer the 3 research questions,the research was mainly conducted in 3steps.First,the target adjective-adverb homomorphs in the 2 parts of speech were queried,with the built-in function of BNC and software such as AntConc to obtain concordance lines and the frequency distributions of the 2 parts of speech.Second,based on the query results,the typical collocations and colligations of the adjective-adverb homomorphs were analyzed by the log-likelihood value.Finally,the results of the native speaker corpus and learner corpus were compared to uncover their differences and similarities.The research results show that the frequency distributions of the 2 parts of speech of adjective-adverb homomorphs are often different in both the native speaker corpus and the Chinese learner corpus.One part of speech is often preferred to the other.In addition,compared with native speakers,Chinese learners tend to overuse or underuse a certain part of speech of those homomorphs.In terms of collocation and colligation,some typical collocations and colligations are the same in the 2 corpora.However,in general,there is a lack of flexibility and diversity in Chinese learners' use of those words.This study has implications for English teaching and learning.With corpus-based teaching methods,English teaching can be promoted in both depth and width.Generalizing words' characteristics in collocation and colligation from teaching materials,or directly extracting teaching materials from corpora,can help to avoid the mother tongue interference and to improve understanding of vocabulary use,or improve the authenticity of language materials.The use of corpora also provides a different perspective on language learning.Based on corpus data,learners can observe,generalize,and summarize various phenomena of language use by themselves,which contributes to enhancing their consciousness of autonomous learning and improving their learning abilities.