A Corpus-based Study Of Verb/Noun Collocation Behaviors Of Chinese College Students

The present research adopts a corpus-based approach and aims to investigate the verb/noun collocation patterns of the Chinese college students.Corpus linguistics is a relatively new approach and owes greatly to the development of computer science. It lays great emphasis on a large collection of authentic and naturally-occurring language behaviors of individual words or phrases. Corpus researchers have found that form and meaning are closely associated and that syntax and lexis are co-selected. In order to study the verb/noun collocation pattern more closely, we base our research on the theory of lexico-grammar, and adopt data-driven approach, which involves both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The corpora used in this research include CLEC as experimental corpora, and Brown and LOB corpora as control corpora. First, we choose six verbs and two nouns, all of which have a relatively high frequency in English. Then their respective concordance lines are retrieved from both CLEC and Brown Corpus, and LOB if the concordance lines from Brown are not adequate enough. After that, we manually single out all the strict verb/noun collocation patterns of each chosen verb and noun, list and count all the noun collocates of each chosen verb and verb collocates of each chosen noun. We compare the verb/noun collocation behaviors of Chinese learners with those of native speakers, describe and analyze the data. It is observed that there is little overlap between collocates chosen by the Chinese learners and those by native speakers. Some collocates used by the Chinese learners do not appear in native speakers' writings at all. It is noticed that Chinese learners' collocate choices are significantly subject to the corresponding collocationpatterns of the same word in their mother tongue Chinese.Then the idea of 'chunk' is offered to account for Chinese learners' deviant collocates. Chinese learners' verb/noun collocation behaviors clearly show their insufficient mastery of typical English chunks. Lastly, it is suggested that more attention be paid to the frequently-used word forms and their typical chunks.