A Study Of Verb-Noun Collocational Errors In English Linguistics Theses Written By MA Students

It is widely acknowledged that collocations are both indispensable and problematic for language learners, and therefore they play an important role in second language acquisition and foreign language learning, especially at an advanced level. So far, many studies have investigated learners’difficulties with collocations. However, these studies mainly cover verb-noun collocational errors committed by middle-school learners and undergraduates, and little studies concern the collocational errors made by postgraduates. Therefore, this study is designed to investigate verb-noun collocational errors in English linguistics theses written by MA students. Based on the classification proposed by Nesselhauf (2003) and Zhang and Yang (2009), classification and analysis of errors were conducted. Then the distribution of each type of verb-noun collocational error was presented and major errors were found. Besides, possible causes of these errors were explored.Forty MA theses in English linguistics were randomly selected for study. After annotation, verb-noun collocations were semi-automatically extracted by AntConc3.2. Then, identification of verb-noun collocational errors was made with the help of dictionaries. As for verb-noun collocational errors in these theses, major findings are as follows:1) Ten types of verb-noun collocational errors have been found in the corpus, which are wrong choice of verbs, wrong choice of nouns, misuse of prepositions collocating with verbs, misuse of prepositions collocating with nouns, misuse of determiners, verbosity, misuse of delexical verbs, number errors, combinations not showing their intended meaning and structure errors.2) The number of each type of verb-noun collocational errors was counted, and the portion of each type taking up was calculated. Then, it has been found that wrong choice of verbs ranks the highest, which indicates that the use of verbs is still difficult for postgraduates. It is found that misuse of prepositions and wrong choice of nouns take up considerable portions which shows that postgraduates do not have a good command of prepositions and nouns.3) The causes of these errors can be categorized into three main sources. The first one is first language transfer. Discrepancies between L1and L2collocations can cause some problems for EFL learners. When collocations in mother tongue and the target language do not match, collocational errors often arise. The second one is intralingual errors, which can be further classified into overgeneralization and ignorance of co-occurrence restrictions. The third one is communication strategy-based errors.4) Due to first language transfer, learners tend to use literal translation without taking the collocational range of the words into consideration.5) Due to intralingual factors, collocational errors occur as a result of overgeneralization of the structures or rules. It has been found that a certain amount of prepositional errors result from overgeneralization. Moreover, in this study, it has been find that learners tend to neglect semantic prosody of the words and use synonyms to substitute the right ones. It has also been found that delexical verb errors can be attributed to the use of communication strategy.Finally, suggestions for collocation learning and teaching are put forward. First, learners should be raised awareness of collocations. Then, dictionaries and corpus can be used for collocation learning and teaching. Last, comparison between Chinese and English collocations should be made to help students realize the similarities and differences between the two languages.