A Corpus-based Study On Acquisition Of English Formulaic Sequences

Vocabulary is an essential part of language learning. Research in corpus linguistics confirms that most words manifest themselves in natural language in form of formulaic sequences, and the mastery of formulaic sequences contributes to fluency and idiomaticity of language output as well. Meanwhile, research also shows that high-frequency words used by native speakers nearly account for 80% of the whole text in daily communication. This result, coupled with the fact that a verb is always regarded as the indispensable backbone of a sentence, gives every reason for researchers’ relentless exploration of high-frequency verbs in SLA field. Nevertheless, most recent studies mainly focus on the acquisition of different sematic items of certain high-frequency verbs, but studies integrating high-frequency word acquisition with formulaic sequence theories seem inadequate in number. Therefore, a research approach of contrastive interlanguage analysis is adopted in this thesis to explore the patterning of formulaic sequence types of high-frequency verb MAKE in interlanguage.The researchers here in this study, by analyzing previous classifications of formulaic sequences, redefine 5 types of MAKE formulaic sequences, namely, polywords, collocations, phrasal constraints, sentence frames and institutionalized phrases. Afterwards, comparative studies are conducted on the patterning of five types of MAKE formulaic sequences in the use of English argumentative writings of two groups, Chinese English learners and native English speakers, based on two corresponding sub-corpora, SWECCL and LOCNESS. By doing this, it aims to find out the similarities and differences in the use of the five types of MAKE formulaic sequences, thus offering helpful suggestions for facilitating English formulaic sequences teaching in China.The research result demonstrates that:1. Within the limit of corpora by hand, the use of MAKE formulaic sequences of Chinese English learners and native English speakers mainly involve four types of the target five ones. Furthermore, all of the four detected types roughly take on a similar descending order in terms of their amount of occurrence frequency in each corpus, that is, polywords> collocations> phrasal constraints> sentence frames;2. Compared with native speakers, Chinese English learners of higher level show significant differences in the use of phrasal constraints, polywords and sentence frames. These differences can be summarized as follows:1) Chinese learners of higher level prominently lack variety in the use of MAKE phrasal constraints, though no significant differences are found in the occurrence frequency between the two groups; 2) Chinese learners of higher level tend to underuse MAKE polywords; 3) Chinese learners of higher level show much poorer variety in their use of MAKE sentence frames, and as well, they are apt to overuse make+NP+VP structure and to use redundant verbs like in the structure make+NP+VP+Adj;3. A chi-square test proves that there is significant correlation between formulaic sequence type and L2 proficiency, and there are significant differences in the use of MAKE collocations and phrasal constraints between Chinese English learners of higher and lower proficiency. Specifically, their differences mainly consist in two aspects:1) lower-level learners’ underuse of MAKE collocations declines with the development of language proficiency; 2) there is a significant difference for the two groups in the use of MAKE phrasal constraints which the lower-level learners use less frequently, and also both groups of Chinese learners show less variety in their use of MAKE phrasal constraints.In a nutshell, the study proves that there are differences in the use of different types of MAKE formulaic sequences among Chinese English learners, which suggests that it is necessary for English teachers to teach differently in accordance with different types of formulaic sequences of high-frequency verbs so as to put forward much more feasible suggestions for the application of formulaic sequence teaching to English teaching field.