A Corpus-Based Study Of The Freshman Learners' Verb/Noun Collocation

This paper carries out a corpus-based study of English verb/noun collocation in the Chinese freshman learners in order to reveal their verb/noun collocation characteristics. At the beginning of this paper, the significance of the present study is presented. Following this, a critical review is given to the definition, classification and previous studies of collocation. In order to examine the freshman learners' verb/noun collocation behavior, a freshman learner corpus named Freshman Corpus was co-established as an experiment corpus, which has made it possible to conduct a quantitative as well as qualitative analysis. The control corpus is Brown Corpus, with ST3 sub-corpus of Chinese Learner English Corpus and Modern Chinese Corpus as reference corpora. By performing the wordlist function of the corpus software AntConc 3.1.302, the node words for case study are selected and they are do, get, give, have, make, take, learn and study. By performing the concordance function of AntConc 3.1.302, the noun collocates of these selected verbs are presented in tables as long as they meet two requirements: the Mi-score and the frequency. At the same time, the typical errors of the learners' verb/noun collocation are also searched. After applying the Contrastive Interlanguage Error Analysis method to analyzing data collected above, the conclusions about the learners' verb/noun collocation behavior are made and suggestions for future teaching and research are given at the end of this paper. The present study finds out: the learners tend to overuse verb/noun collocation when the verbs are common verbs or the verbs they believe they can use correctly; during the process of choosing the collocates, the learners tend to translate the verb into their mother tongue and, according to the Chinese verb/noun collocation convention, make a decision on what noun should be chosen as a collocate; When the English verb/noun collocation coincide with their Chinese counterparts, the learners' verb/noun collocation seems less idiosyncratic. It shows that the learners' mother tongue has a great influence on the appropriateness of the learners' verb/noun collocation.