基于语料库的中国学生习得英语虚化动词搭配语的研究

This study investigates the acquisition of English delexical verb collocations by Chinese-speaking students with intermediate and advanced English proficiency. Collocations of delexical verbs “take”, “make” and “give” were extracted from the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), such as “take action”, “make decisions”, and “give suggestions”. The correct use and misuse of delexical verb collocations were studied with a comparison of the collocations extracted from the English native speaker corpus, Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The collocational types and tokens, semantic transparency, and frequency of the delexical verb collocations used by Chinese-speaking students were examined. The study found that learners used restricted types of delexical verb collocations and seldom used the collocations that were most frequently used by native English speakers. Chinese learners usually used semantically semi-transparent collocations but rarely used semantically non-transparent collocations. The collocations frequently used by Chinese-speaking students were also frequently used by English native speakers. Compared with intermediate learners, advanced learners produced more collocation types and made fewer collocation errors. The errors included mixed usage of delexcial verbs and overgeneralization. The phenomena of avoidance and overconfidence also appeared. The findings of the study provide pedagogical implications for the teaching of English collocations to Chinese students.