CHAPTER IV RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
4.5 Discussion of Verb-Noun Miscollocations
4.5.2 Possible Factors Causing the ESL Learners' Verb-Noun Errors
Based on the study of Liu (1999), there are seven possible sources for ESL learners' V-N misuse: negative L1 transfer, overgeneralization, erroneous use of synonyms, false analogy, approximation, erroneous assumptions, and erroneous coinage. For the convenience of understanding, the author modified erroneous assumptions to erroneous delexical verbs for this study.
Table 4.12 shows the author's general sorting of all the V-N miscollocations and their respective percentages. In terms of types, that is, how many different kinds of V-N misuses can a certain factor be attributed to, the top four most influential factors are a) negative L1 transfer (75 types), b) overgeneralization (23 types), c) erroneous use of synonyms (21 types), and d) false analogy (9 types). As for the overall tokens a
transfer (1376 tokens), b) false analogy (728 tokens), c) erroneous use of synonyms (449 tokens), and d) overgeneralization (213 tokens). In the following passages, ESL learners' V-N misuses are classified with certain special entries introduced, and the author's observation is offered in the end.
Table 4.12 Possible Causes of Verb-Noun Miscollocations: Inter-Type Comparison Possible Causes Type / Percentage Frequency / Percentage Negative L1 Transfer 75 / 56.0% 1376 / 48.4%
Negative L1 transfer means that the features about learners' V-N misuse could be detected with a linguistic involvement of their L1, which is Chinese. Table 4.13 provides these 75 sorts of negative-L1-transfer mistakes, with 1376 tokens in total.
The most common interference discovered in this study is the missing or incorrect use of prepositions for many verbs. For instance, *adapt the society (frequency: 24), with adapt to the society as the right V-N collocation, serves as a typical example of
prepositions necessary for their V-N expressions to be correct. Like the corresponding verb for adapt in Chinese, no preposition is needed. Since many verbs in English often require the use of prepositions as collocates with the verbs/nouns, there inevitably would be a large number of V-N misuses spotted.
In addition, direct Chinese-English translation is another serious problem found in this study. For instance, *eat medicine (frequency: 11), *join an exam (frequency:
35) (discussed in previous sections), *propel the society forward (frequency: 6),
*increase our friendship (frequency: 7), and *close your mobile telephone (frequency:
3) are all obvious cases in which learners adopted the words appearing similar to their Chinese conceptualizations and used them directly.
Table 4.13 Sources of Verb-Noun Miscollocations: Negative L1 Transfer Negative L1 Transfer
No. Incorrect V/N Suggested V/N V-N Miscollocations Frequency
1 study acquire/ obtain/ accumulate study new knowledge 94
2 join take/ have/ sit (for) join the English exam 35
8 fill permeate false certificates fill the society 14
9 gain demonstrate gain greater achievement 14
10 eat take eat medicine 11
11 relax relieve/ reduce relax our stress 10
12 choose identify a way to choose the talents 8
13 learn develop/ nurture learn extra talent 8
14 change exchange change presents with each other 7 15 increase enhance/ cultivate/ foster increase our friendship 7 16 select recognize/ identify means to select human talents 7
17 study attend/ go to/ be admitted to study college 7
18 propel better/ improve propel the society forward 6
19 bring send/ extend bring his wishes to them 5
20 participate take/ have/ sit (for) participate the PE exam 5
21 open turn/ switch on opened the television 4
22 punish prosecute punish those factories 4
23 bring induce/ cause may bring cancer 3
24 close turn/ switch off close your mobile telephone 3
25 remove solve/ bridge remove the generation gap 3
26 renew rebuild/ reconstruct renew the civilization 3
27 taste experience taste true happiness 3
28 transfer move/ relocate transfer the factories and companies 3
29 play play on play my computer 139
30 agree agree with/ to agree this view 135
31 listen listen to listen the music in my free time 115
32 prepare prepare for studied hard to prepare my exam 95
33 search search for search some information 71
34 prepare prepare for prepare the physics test 38
35 learn learn from learn the experience of failure 35
36 go back go back to go back school 34
42 participate participate in participate a club 14
43 participate participate in participate the activity 11
44 complain complain to/ about complain their parents 10
45 catch catch up on catch the latest news 8
46 listen listen to listen English every day 8
47 apply apply to apply the graduate schools 7
48 interfere interfere with interfere others’ lives 7
49 listen listen to listened their programs on air 7
50 chat chat about chat any topic 6
51 decide arrange decide their own marriage 6
57 transfer transfer to transfer another department 5
58 catch catch up with/ keep up with catch her pace 4
59 hike hike up hike a small mountain 4
60 set set up/ build/ construct set a prison 4
61 subscribe subscribe to subscribe the magazine 4
62 arrive arrive at arrive the beach 3
63 consist consist of/ comprise consist professional soldiers 3
64 live live in live the dormitory in the first year 3
73 window view/ vision/ horizons widen the window of the world 7
74 color fun lose the color in our life 3
75 heart eye/ attention the ad just caught her heart 3
Total 1376
Overgeneralization
Overgeneralization here denotes that the verbs/nouns ESL learners used are over-extended from their original linguistic expressions to more unrelated ones. This way, they resulted in unacceptable instances. These overgeneralized words are not always syntactically deviant in their V-N miscollocations. However, there are certain
specified contexts for them to apply to, and in these V-N misuses, they have been overused by ESL learners.
For examples, in *looked this TV advertisement (frequency: 7), other than the wrong use of the phrase look at, there are other suitable noun collocates for look at to apply to such as painting, star, etc. Yet, for TV advertisement, watch or see definitely would be a better verb collocate. Also, in *appreciated my teacher (frequency: 7), clearly teacher is not a noun to be appreciated, whereas teacher's guidance is. Many similar cases were found to be like these, especially for the noun part. This reflects a question worthy of further inspection. Instead of verbs, which tend to be the emphasis of SLA research most of the time, should the detail of their noun collocates be scrutinized more? Table 4.14 points out all the overgeneralized verb and noun usages in their V-N miscollocations, with 23 types overall and 213 tokens.
Table 4.14 Sources of Verb-Noun Miscollocations: Overgeneralization Overgeneralization
No. Incorrect V/N Suggested V/N V-N Miscollocations Frequency
1 talk tell/ crack talked many jokes 7
2 attach place/ put/ lay…on attach emphasis to the theory 7
3 look watch/ see looked this TV advertisement 7
4 reduce disrupt/ restrict/ limit reduce their communication 7 5 finish fulfill/ satisfy/ meet/ achieve finish their wish 6
6 live spend/ have live a better childhood 4
7 say speak/ talk in say good English 4
8 solve correct/ rectify/ remedy solve this mistake 4
9 catch touch it really caught my heart 3
10 cost take cost a few seconds 3
11 talk tell/ reveal talk their secrets 3
12 lesson subjects studied my lessons well 26
13 computer computer skills want to learn computer well 19
14 lottery lottery ticket buy the lottery again 17
15 student student’s learning/ judgment cultivate students and help them 17
16 spring a hot spring bath take a hot spring 15
17 ability skills practice your ability 14
18 computer computer science study computer in the future 12
19 mind character cultivate children's mind 11
20 pollution pollution problem solve the pollution 9
21 mail the meaning of mail don't forget conventional mails
while writing an email 8
22 teacher teacher's guidance appreciated my teacher 7
23 manner manners/ etiquette emphasize the manner 3
Total 213
Erroneous Use of Synonyms
As discussed in the earlier section (error categorizations), misuse of synonyms is also one of the major sources of ESL learners' V-N miscollocations. Here, Table 4.15 shows a total of 21 types, with 449 tokens of V-N miscollocations of synonym misuse.
The reason why the numbers of Table 4.15 are not the same as that of the aforementioned Table 4.4 about synonymous-verb-pair misuse is that since their ways of categorizing learners' error types and their possible causes are totally different from each other, their corresponding results and numbers would be varied as well.
Table 4.15 Sources of Verb-Noun Miscollocations: Erroneous Use of Synonyms Erroneous Use of Synonyms
No. Incorrect V/N Suggested V/N V-N Miscollocations Frequency
1 accept receive/ enter/ have accept higher education 130
2 keep maintain sports are good ways to keep health 60
3 catch grab/ seize catch that chance immediately 25
4 train enhance/ increase/ develop train our ability through practice 24
5 take get/ have/ earn take good grades on exams 18
6 enlarge broaden/ expand/ widen enlarge our horizons 11
7 devote donate devote two million dollars 5
8 appreciate enjoy appreciate the comfortable wind 3
9 content fulfill/ satisfy content my desire 3
10 gain earn/ win gained five thousand dollars 3
11 promise grant parents promised their wish 3
12 realize understand/ comprehend how much they realize the lessons 3 13 realize understand realize the custom of many countries 3
14 work job change work 124
15 sight view/ vision/ horizons open their sight 8
16 sight view/ vision/ horizons widen your sight 6
17 sight view/ vision/ horizons expand your sight 6
18 sight eye/ attention attract the readers’ sight 5
19 fame reputation improve their fame 3
20 mail letter finished an English mail 3
21 sight view/ vision/ horizons broaden our sight 3
Total 449
False Analogy
False analogy means the way a verb/noun is misused is based on a similar structure of other words, whereas this misused verb/noun should have been applied in a syntactically different context. Like *adjust the society (frequency: 11), a common expression made by ESL learners, an actual natural way of saying this should be
adjust oneself to the society instead. Table 4.16 presents 9 types of V-N
miscollocations about false analogy, with 728 tokens overall.
One background for *live outside campus to take up 544 tokens is that, after looking into the corpus data, the author found renting a place or living in the dorm in college was in fact a large-scale exam topic of English compositions. Many Chinese
ESL learners, of course, used *live outside campus to mean renting a place outside school, which resulted in an especially huge number of similar V-N miscollocations.
Table 4.16 Sources of Verb-Noun Miscollocations: False Analogy False Analogy
No. Incorrect V/N Suggested V/N V-N Miscollocations Frequency
1 mature cultivate mature our thought 5
2 disappear lose (be lost) my pen was disappeared 3
3 pay place/ put/ lay…on pay emphasis on modernization 3
4 live outside live off live outside campus 544
5 get get to/ reach get the other side of a river 12
6 adjust adjust oneself to we should adjust the society
through college life 11
Approximation means the situation of two orthographically similar words causing learners' confusion and later the use of these approximately alike words in an
erroneous manner. For instance, *release the endless pain (frequency: 22), in which relieve should be the correct one, was produced by learners due to the highly similar
forms of release and relieve. Table 4.17 offers 4 type and 64 tokens of V-N misuse stemming from approximation factors.
Table 4.17 Sources of Verb-Noun Miscollocations: Approximation Approximation
No. incorrect V/N Suggested V/N V-N Miscollocations Frequency 1 release relieve/ lessen/ alleviate release the endless pain 22
2 take make take a mistake 14
3 release relieve/ lighten/ ease/ alleviate release the heavy burden 13
4 department apartment rent an department to be my home 15
Total 64
Erroneous Delexical Verbs
In Table 4.18, since the meaning of invention is quite clear, the choice of the verb collocate to be invent would be somehow redundant. A delexical verb like make or in other situations like do or have could be sufficient.
Table 4.18 Sources of Verb-Noun Miscollocations: Erroneous Delexical Verbs Erroneous Delexical Verbs
No. incorrect V/N Suggested V/N V-N Miscollocations Frequency
1 invent make/ develop/ work on invent an invention 6
Total 6
Erroneous Coinage
The coinage factor denotes that the meaning of a verb/noun is misunderstood and further used in an erroneous way developed by learners themselves. As the word fasten shown in Table 4.19, there is no meaning of fasten to be increasing the speed of
something. The V-N collocation produced undoubtedly would be a wrong one.
Table 4.19 Sources of Verb-Noun Miscollocations: Erroneous Coinage Erroneous Coinage
No. incorrect V/N Suggested V/N V-N Miscollocations Frequency
1 fasten increase fasten your speed 5
Total 5
According to the error source ranks for erroneous V-N types and erroneous V-N frequency, several possible situations are reflected on.
First, a serious effect of L1 influence still causes much trouble for Chinese ESL learners' linguistic production. Both the 75 types (56%) and frequency of 1376 tokens (48.4%) indicate that up to 50% of ESL learners' V-N misuse could still result from the interference of their mother tongue, no matter what sorts of errors they are, that is, verb-based or noun-based mistakes.
Second, along students' learning process, their vocabulary size is bound to increase. Yet, they still seem to encounter problems of learning and utilizing certain
noun phrases in V-N collocations well. In terms of learners' V-N misuse sources, overgeneralization is the factor with second most diverse errors (23 types). However, its total tokens of misuse (213 tokens) are ranked the fourth one. The author's observation is that with a moderate number of tokens in total, learners' need of these V-N miscollocation types might not be very high. But since the figure (23 overgeneralization types) is still ranked as the second most, they seem to remain difficult for learners to utilize correctly, especially those noun phrases in V-N overgeneralizations (cf. Table 4.14).
Third, erroneous use of synonyms, ranked third both in source types and frequency, demonstrates a persistent hurdle for learners to master synonymous vocabulary use. Since the key often lies in the actual examples for different synonyms to apply, a rather subtle and complicated aspect of V-N usages, Chinese ESL learners, dwelling in a Chinese-dominant environment, might need more opportunities for English input and exercises in class for them to really understand how to differentiate certain semantically similar verb/noun pairs.
From the sections about salient types of verb/noun miscollocates and the possible factors causing learners' V-N miscollocations, several crucial issues have been brought up again. Hopefully, through a collaborative effort among researchers and practitioners, a more innovative method of V-N collocation teaching and learning
could be soon developed.
Compared with the works of Liu (2002), Nesselhauf (2005), and Lin (2010), this study has exhibited several distinct facets of advantages, which not only probes into an alternative method of collocation research but also points out certain significant directions for future exploration.
In the first place, with the assistance of Sketch-Diff, a semi-automated function of online collocate inspection, a noun's entire verb collocates respectively from the BNC and a Chinese ESL learner corpus were extracted first. Then, based on each verb collocate's corresponding frequency in the two corpora, the author decided which V-N collocations should be considered for further examination. In the studies of Liu (2002) and Nesselhauf (2005), all the texts produced by ESL learners were combed line by line, which demanded much human labor. Furthermore, even though some miscollocations might just have appeared once, they were still incorporated in Liu's and Nesselhauf's final results. This study, on the contrary, only counted those miscollocations not found in the BNC but discovered 3 times or above in the ESL learner corpus as valid and significant V-N miscollocations. With the online platform of SKE and a frequency threshold for V-N miscollocations, the results were generated efficiently, and more convincingly as well.
Second, as for the statistical figures of these studies, in Liu's, Nesselhauf's, and Lin's studies, their total tokens of V-N miscollocations found were 233, 744, and 1041.
In this study, the total tokens of deviant V-N collocations discovered are 2841, a much larger number than the previous works. Yet, when the overall types of V-N miscollocations are taken into consideration, am interesting situation was noticed. In Lin's work, her types of ESL learners' V-N miscollocations found were 210 types in the Taiwanese ESL learner corpus, and 268 types in the CLEC. The total types of Chinese ESL learners' V-N errors discovered in this study, however, are 134. There are three possible factors influencing this final result. First, many types of V-N errors in Lin's result were about the erroneous use of articles (*write letter whereas write a letter is the right one) and determiners (*play piano whereas play the piano should be
correct), both of which were not included in this study. Another factor is that, as mentioned in Section 3.4, Data Analysis, the online SKE platform treats all parts of speech of a word as separate and independent categories. Verb-Noun category, consequently, is classified from other ones like Modifier-Noun, Adjective-Noun, etc, which narrowed the scope of this research down to specifically semantic association analyses between a noun and its direct verb collocates. The last one is that in Lin's study, a program called Perl was applied to extract all the suspicious V-N collocations from two ESL learner corpora for further human examination, while in this study only
the nouns passing the frequency count threshold of 300 were incorporated for the target research. Since the initial purposes and ranges of searching were discrete, the findings between Lin's and this study were understandably different from each other.
Last but not least, the misuse of nouns identified in this study, with 28 types (507 tokens) confirmed and as one of the major types of V-N errors, was extensively discussed. This was also the case in Nesselhauf's study, in which 225 tokens of noun misuse were found among the V-N miscollocations. However, in Liu's and Lin's studies, the analyses about noun deviations in learners' V-N miscollocations were somehow missing. Liu brought up the importance of nouns in V-N collocation research in her study, but in her final result, the foreseeable difficulty ESL learners could face when trying to use correct nouns in V-N combinations was not inspected with supporting evidence. While nouns could indeed perform as an influential error type in ESL learners' V-N misuse, in addition to the examination of verbs most of the time, researchers should start considering nouns in their analysis structure in the future.
CHAPTER V CONCLUSION
5.1 Summary of the Major Findings
Research Question 1: Can Sketch Diff, a semi-automated corpus-based function of
The Sketch Engine, an online platform, be experimented to compare the Verb-Noun
collocations between native and non-native English speakers?
The semi-automated method on the Sketch Engine platform indeed contributed much to the fast, systematic combing of corpus data, and displayed a precise comparison between the language use of native speakers and that of ESL learners in an efficient manner.
The target learner corpus for this study is converged by CLEC, SWECCL, JECC, and Taiwanese Learner Corpus, the biggest size of Chinese ESL learner corpus so far (7,376,712 tokens). With the frequency threshold of 300 in the ESL learner corpus, a list of 690 key nouns was generated for this study. As for the valid V-N misuse type count, each type of V-N miscollocation has to include more than three tokens. Finally, there are overall 134 types of Chinese ESL learners' Verb-Noun miscollocations found, with 2841 tokens in total.
Research Question 2: What are the types of miscollocations made by Chinese ESL
learners?
Among these V-N miscollocations, there are basically three aspects of misuse－
simple verb usages, noun usages, prepositional and phrasal verb usages. Generally, the most common misuse of Verb-Noun miscollocations was found to be in the prepositional and phrasal verb category, with 43 types and 1502 tokens. Deviant simple verb use, on the other hand, occupied the most various kinds of usages, with 63 different types in total and 832 tokens. Erroneous noun use was the least common both in variety and quantity, with 28 types of Verb-Noun miscollocations and 507 tokens overall.
Research Question 3: What can be the possible causes of Chinese ESL learners'
collocational misuse?
In terms of error source types, that is, how many different kinds of V-N misuses can a certain factor be attributed to, the influential factors are a) negative L1 transfer (75 types), b) overgeneralization (23 types), c) erroneous use of synonyms (21 types), d) false analogy (9 types), e) approximation (4 types), f) erroneous delexical verbs (1 type), and g) erroneous coinage (1 type). As for the overall tokens a source could
possibly cover, the sources are a) negative L1 transfer (1376 tokens), b) false analogy (728 tokens), c) erroneous use of synonyms (449 tokens), d) overgeneralization (213 tokens), e) approximation (64 tokens), f) erroneous delexical verbs (6 tokens), and g) erroneous coinage (5 tokens).
5.2 Pedagogical Implications
Based on the results and overall design of this study, certain pedagogical
Based on the results and overall design of this study, certain pedagogical