A Corpus-based Study On Non-English Majors’ Use Of Have In Colligation And Collocation

Vocabulary is the basic unit of the English language. Vocabulary acquisition is of critical importance in English language acquisition. Wilkins (1972:111) pointed that without grammar little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed. As one of the most important categories of vocabulary, verbs play a central role in traditional grammar and the correct use of English verbs to a large extent determines the realization of the function of the English language. Colligation and collocation can show learners mastery of the depth of English vocabulary.This dissertation chooses the high-frequency verb have as the target to explore the characteristics of non-English majors’use of have in colligation and collocation. A corpus-based Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis approach is adopted by comparing the two corpus:LOCNESS as a referent corpus and CLEC as an interlanguage corpus. Colligation and collocation theory, Interlanguage theory, error analysis theory and contrastive theory are adopted. Based on Firth’s (1957:197) definitions of colligation and collocation, this dissertation studies six colligation patterns of have:"have+past participle", "modal verb+have+past participle", "have+noun", "have+object+verb-inf/verb-ing/verb-ed/adj/adv/preposition", "have to" and "habitual usage". Collocation in this dissertation refers to the collocation relation between have and specific nouns under "have+noun", including each sense of have, specific nouns that collocate with have and collocation errors of "have+noun". The research questions are:1) What are the characteristics of have use by non-English majors in their writings compared with native speakers? 2) Compared with native speakers, what are the trends of each colligation of have use by non-English majors in their writings? 3) How non-English majors use each sense of have and specific nouns that collocate with have in their writings compared with native speakers? 4) What are the characteristics of collocation errors of "have +noun" and what are the reasons of these errors?The data of the two corpora are extracted and classified by the software Antconc3.2.1and compared and summarized SPSS. The statistical analysis shows the following results:(1) Non-English majors tend to underuse have compared to native speakers.(2) Both groups practice "have+past participle" and "have+noun" more frequently, with the other four colligations not often utilized. Meanwhile, compared with native speakers, non-English majors are more extreme in adopting the six colligations. Moreover, despite the fact that non-English majors tend to underuse have as a whole compared with native speakers, they overuse "have+noun" and "habitual usage" colligations.(3) Both groups practice the first sense and the second sense more frequently, with the other eight senses not often utilized. Compared with native speakers, non-English majors are less balanced in adopting the ten senses. Non-English majors underuse the first sense, the fourth sense, the eighth sense and the tenth sense compared to native speakers while they tend to overuse the rest six senses. Great differences between two groups lie in the second, third, fourth and tenth sense and the specific nouns collocating with have that non-English majors use in their writings are less diverse and flexible than that native speakers use.(4) Collocation errors of "have+noun" in non-English majors’writings make up more than half of all "have+noun" collocations. Mother tongue negative transfer, poor mastery of the rules of target language and the both together are the reasons for the collocation errors, of which mother tongue negative transfer is the main error source.Based on the discussion of the research results, some pedagogical implications have been obtained.(1) In English language teaching and learning, both instructors and learners should raise their awareness of the importance of the high-frequency verbs.(2) Non-English majors’poor mastery of the depth knowledge of the high-frequency verbs is directly related to their incapacity of grasping the chunk. Hence, chunk teaching and learning should be one of the focuses of English vocabulary teaching and learning. Teachers and students should learn vocabulary in its context to extract the chunks that can manifest the colligations and collocations of the vocabularies and then to teach and learn these chunks.(3) The data of the corpora provide strong statistical evidence for language instructors and learners and offer an insightful way to future interlanguage research. Both teachers and students should try to use the native corpora and learner corpora in language teaching and learning.