A Contrastive Study Of Adverb-Adjective Collocation In Writing Between Chinese English-Major Learners And Native English Speakers

Collocations play a crucial role in daily language usage. However, owing to their wide classifications, it is hard for language learners to really master their meanings and usages.With the aid of TreeTagger and BFSU PowerConc 1.0. and based on CLEC and LOCNESS, the present study intends to compare the Chinese English-major learners’ and native English speakers’ actual use of adverb-adjective collocation. The research procedures consist of three steps. First, TreeTagger is used to get the tagged texts; then, BFSU PowerConc 1.0. is launched to extract concordance lines of adverb-adjective collocation in each corpus; last, the adverb-adjective collocations are summarized and comparisons are made between the two corpora.The results indicate that there are differences as well as similarities in the preferences for adverbs as adjective premodifiers between Chinese English majors and native speakers. The results are as follows:(1) Compared with native English speakers, Chinese English majors underuse viewpoint subjuncts and downtoners as the premodyfiers of adjectives. (2) For both native English speakers and Chinese English majors, the proportions of maximizers and boosters are very similar. (3) As to the use of downtoners, for both native English speakers and Chinese English majors, the proportions of approximators, compromisers, and diminishers in the two corpora are very similar. However, minimizers is not found in the corpus LOCNESS.The study has some implications for English language teaching, vocabulary learning, as well as the textbook and dictionary compiling.