A Corpus-Based Study Of Delexical Verb Collocations Used By Chinese EFL Students

Collocation is the way words combine in a language to produce natural-sounding speech and writing. A large body of studies show that collocation is a problematic area for learning English as a foreign language. The present study therefore focuses on the collocation characteristics of four delexical verbs used by Chinese English-Major learners. A corpus-based Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) approach was adopted in the study to examine their performance in writing.By comparing the collocations of the four delexical verbs in the corpus of WECCL with those in the corpus of BROWN, the striking characteristics of the collocations of the four delexical verbs produced by the Chinese English-Major learners are revealed. The research shows that the Chinese learners showed a strong tendency to overuse the collocations of the four delexical verbs. They produced fewer collocation types of the four delexical verbs than the American native speakers. It is also found that though some of the collocations of the four delexical verbs produced by the Chinese English-Major learners were shared by the American speakers, they are different in frequency and typicality. Focusing on the inappropriate collocations with reference to the native speaker corpus, the examination of the four delexical verbs show that general verb effect, language transfer, repetition and avoidance are vital factors for the misuses of the collocations of this kind.Through tentative analyzing, explaining, comparing, evaluating and commenting on the major findings, the study get implications guiding English language teaching and learning. It was necessary for teachers to raise students' awareness of collocation and teach collocations with reference to the Chinese language. At the same time, teachers should increase collocation input by using corpus and concordance. Encouraging students to produce collocations in their speaking and writing is also an effective way.