Verb-noun Collocations In Chinese As A Second Language

Collocation is one of the essential parts of knowledge of second language acquisition. The present study investigates the use of Chinese verb-noun collocations in the writing of native speakers of Indonesian. For this purpose, we compiled a learner corpus that consists of about 400,000 words of class assignment and HSK test essays. In addition, we selected LCMC, a Chinese native speakers' corpus which consist of diverse range of text types for comparative analysis.First, we retrieved the 22 most frequently occurring verbs in the native speaker corpus and in the learner corpus. Then, we investigated all the concordance lines with these verbs and extracted verb-noun collocations both in native speaker and learner corpus. This comparison mainly focused on the number of collocation, the number of combination type, and the correctness of the collocation.The analysis indicates that the number of collocation that learners produce slightly higher, but the combination type amount fewer than native speakers'. Besides, learners tend to have problems with multiple meaning and high-frequency verbs. The unawareness of pattern differences between mother tongue and second language collocations often leads students to produce mistakes in verb-noun collocations.