A Corpus-based Study Of Delexical Verb-noun Collocation In ECLDs

This thesis focuses on delexical verb-noun collocations in English.Based on authentic data from learner corpus,it investigates Chinese EFL learners' performance on delexical verb-noun collocations,and examines the treatment of delexical verb-noun collocations in current ECLDs.By revealing the deficiency of ECLDs in dealing with such collocations,it is intended to shed some light on the optimization of the presentation of delexical verb-noun collocations in ECLDs.The learner corpus adopted in this research is the WECCL 2.0.On the one hand,this research adopts the approach of error analysis(EA)to identify what kind of errors that Chinese EFL learners frequently made and what causes those errors.On the other hand,this research takes the LOCNESS as a native English reference corpus to compare the difference in using delexical verb-noun collocations between learners and native speakers by means of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis(CIA),in order to find out how learners master this kind of collocations.Based on the findings of EA and CIA,this study examines the presentation of delexical verb-noun collocations in current ECLDs and finds out some deficiencies.Firstly,the information of delexical verb-noun collocations is insufficient.Secondly,there is a lack of error warnings specific for Chinese EFL learner.Thirdly,current ECLDs ignore the specific productive needs of Chinese EFL learners.The thesis finally proposes some suggestions for improving the presentation of delexical verb-noun collocations in ECLDs,such as providing more collocations based on the analysis of large corpora and leaner corpora,and presenting them with a variety of ways like highlighting them in example sentences,containing them in noun entries,providing collocation columns and error warning notes,etc.