A Corpus-based Study Of Chinese Learners' Acquisition Features Of English Delexical Verbs

The collocation of delexical verbs is of great significance in the study of collocation.Based on the theory of error analysis and the theory of interlanguage contrastive analysis,this study collects data in five sub-corpora of the Chinese learner corpus CLEC and the native language corpus LOCNESS to study six delexical verbs(do,get,give,have,make,take)and their collocations.The research questions run as follows:(1)compared with native speakers,do Chinese English learners tend to overuse or underuse delexical verbs?(2)Compared with native speakers,do Chinese English learners tend to overuse or underuse delexical verb collocations?(3)What characteristics do Chinese learners at different levels present while they use English delexical verbs?It is found that the general feature of Chinese learners' acquisition of delexical verbs is that Chinese learners use delexical verbs more frequently than native speakers.This may be related to two factors.Firstly,learners have been exposed to delexical verbs in the early stages of English learning,but the delexical verb collocation is relatively fixed and lacks flexibility.Secondly,Chinese learners have a limited English vocabulary,and they have a weak grasp of some special usages or idiomatic fixed collocations,which makes it difficult to extract lexical chunks.Therefore,they adopt risk-avoiding strategies to achieve the purpose of overall communication.Compared with native speakers,Chinese learners present three main features in the use of delexical verb collocations.Firstly,the verb collocation used by Chinese English learners involves a similar range of verb semantic meanings as native speakers,but the proportion is different.Chinese learners tend to use the core meanings of verbs,and their ability to use collocations with higher degree of delexicalization is lower than that of native speakers.Secondly,Chinese learners have different preferences for the delexical verb collocation from native speakers.The same delexical verb collocation has different typicalities in the mental lexicon of Chinese English learners and native speakers.Thirdly,English collocations can directly correspond to its Chinese version.These three characteristics may be related to the following reasons.Some domestic English textbooks show inadequate and insufficient delexical verb collocations.Additionally,Chinese learners are influenced by such factors as L1 transfer,over generalization,neglect of the habitual collocation of words,and the omnipotent effect of verbs when using delexical verb collocations.Chinese learners at different levels also have their own characteristics in acquiring delexical verbs.Firstly,in the internal comparison among non-English majors,learners at the higher level use the delexical verbs more frequently.They use more nouns to collocate with verbs and the meanings covered by the verbs are wider.Their ability to use delexical verbs and collocations is closer to native speakers' level.However,in the internal comparison of English majors,compared with the junior students,the senior students obviously use fewer delexical verbs and “delexical verb+ noun” collocations.And the meanings covered by the verbs in these collocations are not as wide as those used by the junior students.Secondly,two phenomena can be found by observing nouns in delexical verb collocations.The first finding is the phenomenon of “multi-use of one word”.Learners use a limited number of nouns with broad meanings and learners tend to focus on their core meanings.The second finding is that these commonly used nouns reflect students' daily behaviors and psychological activities to a certain extent.Students have a heavy pressure of study and employment,but they have a strong concern for society which they are eager to participate in.Based on the results of this study,some pedagogical suggestions and solutions are proposed for collocation teaching.Teachers can make full use of corpus resources and the influence of L1 positive transfer.Teachers should pay more attention to the teaching of language form and deepen the teaching of vocabulary knowledge,in order to improve the ability of Chinese English learners to use the delexical verb and its collocations.