2010 年 10 月
中国应用语言学（双月刊）
Oct. 2010
第 33 卷 第 5 期
Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics (Bimonthly)
Vol. 33 No. 5
Lexical Acquisition Viewed from a
Contrastive Analysis of Collocational
Behavior of Near Synonyms
PAN Fan
Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Abstract
This paper makes a contrastive analysis of the collocational features of cause and lead to in
SWECCL (Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners) and BNC by using the
collocational study methods of corpus linguistics. In this research, first, the semantic prosody
distribution of the near synonyms in two corpora were investigated; second, by defining
minimum frequency (≥5) and MI score(≥3), the collocates of the synonyms were computed
and listed in the order of frequency, and then a comparison was made between collocational
features of cause and lead to in two corpora. The data showed that English-major learners
demonstrated similar semantic preferences with the native speakers, but that there were
still great differences in their underlying collocational patterns. The English-major learners
seemed to have acquired the semantic features of the near synonyms, but far more efforts
need to be made to improve the depth and breadth of their lexis. This paper also discussed the
implications for language teaching.
Key words: collocational features; semantic prosody; near synonyms; lexical acquisition
1. Introduction
With the development of corpus linguistics, semantic prosody has aroused wide concern
from language researchers. The concept of “semantic prosody” was first borrowed by
Sinclair (1987: 155-156) from the phonology research of the British linguist Firth. He
extended the “prosody” concept from phonology to lexical research. He realized that lexical
meaning was closely related to its context and lexical meaning was sometimes collocational
meaning. So he paid special attention to the collocational research and pushed Firth’s
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linguistic theories forward to form Neo-Firthianism with the help of other linguists. After
Sinclair, other linguists continued to study semantic prosody and they proposed different
definitions. Louw (1993: 157) proposed a working definition of semantic prosody in his
study: a semantic prosody refers to a form of meaning which is established through the
proximity of a consistent series of collocates, often able to be characterized as positive or
negative, and whose primary function is to express the feelings of its speaker or writer
towards some pragmatic situation. Stubbs (1996: 176) defined semantic prosody as “a
particular collocational phenomenon” and collocation as “the habitual co-occurrence
of two or more words”. Moreover, he classified semantic prosody into three categories:
negative prosody, positive prosody and neutral prosody. In Stubbs’ framework of semantic
prosody, he highlighted the relationship between collocation and semantic prosody and
emphasized that they both were subject to the co-selection of lexis. For instance, provide
was liable to collocate with words (e.g., assistance, funds, opportunities, relief, etc.) in the
semantic fields of care, food, help, money, to build up a favorable prosody. Partington
(1998: 68) regarded semantic prosody as the spreading of connotational coloring beyond
single word boundaries. According to his view, semantic prosody described the same kind
of evaluative meaning, but spread over a unit of language, which potentially went well
beyond the single orthographic word and was much less evident to the naked eye. A clear
example was the word commit, the unfavorable connotation could be seen to reside not
simply in the word itself but over a unit consisting of commit and its collocates: offences,
serious crime, foul, etc.).
All the definitions reflected the close relationship between the semantic prosody of a
form and its collocates. The emotional preference reflected by a certain word is, in fact, the
result of the co-occurrence of the word and its collocates. In a word, semantic prosody is
achieved by its frequent collocates, so it also falls into the field of collocational study.
Contrastive study was a research method in collocation study and semantic prosody.
With the relevant data of learner corpora and reference corpora, corpus methods were
adopted to generalize the similarities and differences between the interlanguage and native
language, thus to find the non-nativeness of the interlanguage (Wei, 2006: 50). Wang and
Wang (2005: 297-307) conducted research on the word cause based on the CLEC and
BNC, and found that in the collocation of cause and change, cause and great(er, est), the
Chinese learners overused the positive semantic prosody, and underused the negative
semantic prosody. Wei (2006: 50-54) investigated the words commit, cause and effect, based
on CLEC, COBUILD and JDEST. He emphasized that compared with native speakers,
Chinese EFL learners had a narrow range of collocations, vague semantic meanings,
underused or overused semantic prosody. He analyzed the prosodic clash caused by the
unusual collocations and explained from a functional perspective that native speakers
created collocations to achieve some effects—irony, insincerity and so on, while the
Chinese learners’ inappropriate use of collocations was the signal of pragmatic failure.
Some research has also been carried out on the collocational differences on near
synonyms. In this paper, near synonyms refer to lexical pairs that have very similar
cognitive and denotational meanings, but which may differ in collocational or prosodic
behavior. As such, synonymous words are not collocationally interchangeable. Halliday
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Lexical Acquisition Viewed from a Contrastive Analysis of Collocational Behavior of Near Synonyms
(1976: 73) observed that tea was typically described as strong rather than powerful whereas
a car was more likely to be described as powerful than strong, even though the two
modifiers shared similar denotational meanings. Xiao and McEnery (2006: 103-129) made
a comparative empirical study of semantic prosody from a cross-linguistic perspective.
The contrastive analysis showed that semantic prosody and semantic preferences are as
observable in Chinese as they are in English. As the semantic prosodies of near synonyms
and the semantic preferences of their collocates were different, near synonyms were
normally not interchangeable in either language. While weak and feeble have similar
cognitive meanings, native speakers of English prefer to say weak tea rather than feeble
tea. In addition to collocational behavior, near synonyms could also differ in semantic
prosodies, e.g., fickle is negative whereas flexible was positive (Tognini-Bonelli, 2001: 1824). Wen (2007) compared the semantic prosody of two near synonyms based on corpus,
rather and fairly. She found that in the adv + adj/adv colligation, rather tended to collocate
with negative words like superfluous, dismal, squalid, ugly, sad, sordid, and disappointing,
while fairly tended to collocate with positive words like typical, safe, rapid, accurate, clearly,
good, wide and so on. Though rather and fairly had the same denotational meaning, their
semantic prosody differed from each other distinctively. From the traditional perspective,
the two items can be differentiated from experience and intuition, but semantic prosody
provides a new method to distinguish the near synonyms.
These empirical studies show that most of the contrastive studies conducted in China
were based on the corpus CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus). In other words, the
subjects of these studies were mostly Chinese non-English major learners. Little work has
been done based on Chinese English major learners, and far less work has been undertaken
contrasting the semantic prosodic features and collocation behaviors of near synonyms
between English-major learners and native English speakers.
The present study aimed to deepen the understanding on the collocational
awareness and capabilities of English major students by observing their semantic prosody
preferences. The pair of near synonyms (cause and lead to) was investigated for two
reasons. First, though they have similar denotational meanings, there are great differences
between their semantic prosody and collocates. Second, compared with other similar
expressions (e.g., bring about, result in/from, give rise to…), these two near synonyms
are more frequently used by Chinese learners and often considered collocationally
interchangeable. A contrastive analysis of the learners’ collocational behavior using these
near synonyms may highlight differences in underlying collocation patterns.
2. Research Method and Questions
A data-driven approach and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) were applied in
the study. WECCL in Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL)
was chosen as the learner corpus. This corpus contained 1 million words of mostly
English argumentative writing by English-major students. A sub-corpus of the BNC
(British National Corpus) was compiled as the reference corpus, which was given the
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name of “ABNC” in the present paper. This 12 million word sub-corpus is composed
of written component selected randomly from BNC by deleting the spoken component
and obviously irrelevant written component. The British National Corpus (BNC), built
between 1991 and 1994, is a 100 million-word collection of samples of written and spoken
language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of
British English from the later part of the 20th century. The spoken component of the
BNC constitutes approximately 10 percent (10 million words) of the total and the written
component 90 percent (90 million words). There are nine written domains in the corpus:
applied science, arts, belief and thought, commerce and finance, imaginative, leisure,
natural and pure science, social science, and world affairs.
AntConc software was used to identify the concordance lines of cause and lead to and
their collocates. The MI score was used here to measure the collocational strength of node
word and its collocates. According to Church and Hanks (1990), if MI score≥3, there is
strong collocational strength between the node word and its collocate. In this study, within
a 4-4 window span, items which have a minimum co-occurrence frequency of 5 and a
minimum MI score of 3 are considered to be collocates of a node word.
This study explores the non-nativeness features of verb (phrase) collocation used
by English-major learners by making a comparison between learner corpus SWECCL
and native corpus BNC. It tries to answer the following questions: (a) Do English-major
learners share similar semantic prosody preferences with native speakers when using cause
and lead to? (b) Is there any non-nativeness in the collocational patterns of English-major
learners? (c) If non-nativeness does exist, what exactly are its manifestations? (d) What are
the reasons for the non-nativeness?
3. Results and Analysis
The study on cause and lead to was carried out in two steps. First, a comparison of the
distribution of semantic prosody of each of the two items was made between the two
corpora. Second, a comparison of verb + noun collocation patterns of each of them was
likewise made between the two corpora.
3.1 Comparison on Distribution of Semantic Prosody
By searching cause (including causes, caused, causing) in WECCL and ABNC, 579 and 4782
concordance lines were obtained respectively. Table 1 shows the distribution of positive,
negative and neutral semantic prosody, obtained after a random sampling analysis of all
concordance lines. The noun forms of cause were not taken into consideration because
cause and lead to can only be near synonyms when cause is used as a verb. Actually, no
noun forms of cause were found in WECCL, but about 1.62% of cause in ABNC acted as a
noun.
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Lexical Acquisition Viewed from a Contrastive Analysis of Collocational Behavior of Near Synonyms
Table 1. Distribution of semantic prosody of cause
Positive (%)
Negative (%)
Neutral (%)
WECCL
1.08
97.30
1.62
ABNC
1.4
92.96
5.64
Table 1 shows that negative collocates of cause predominate in both corpora, 97.30% in
WECCL and 92.96% in ABNC, while positive collocates of cause account for only 1% in
both. This finding is consistent with the study of Stubbs (1996) in which he found cause
had a strong negative prosody. It can be seen from Table 1 that, English-major learners
share similar semantic prosody preferences with native speakers when using cause.
By searching lead to (including leads to, led to, leading to) in WECCL and ABNC,
103 and 2306 concordance lines were obtained. Table 2 shows the distribution of positive,
negative and neutral semantic prosody, obtained after a random sampling analysis of
all concordance lines. All the concordance lines of lead to related to directions were
eliminated.
Table 2. Distribution of semantic prosody of lead to
Positive (%)
Negative (%)
Neutral (%)
WECCL
28.09
65.17
6.74
ABNC
15.17
70.22
14.61
Table 2 shows that negative collocates of lead to are still the major use in the two corpora,
65.17% in WECCL and 70.22% in ABNC, but compared with cause, the percentage 27.01%
and 13.77% are respectively lower. It can be seen from Table 2 that, like cause, Englishmajor learners also share similar semantic prosody preferences with native speakers when
using lead to.
3.2 Comparison on High Frequency Collocates of Cause
With the use of AntConc and with the minimum frequency (≥5) and span (-4/+4), the
words that collocate with cause were extracted from WECCL; altogether 89 of them were
obtained after combining singular and plural forms. Then their MI scores were computed.
The collocates are listed in the order of frequency in Table 3. The boldfaced words in the
table are shared collocates by WECCL and ABNC.
Table 3. High frequency collocates of cause in WECCL (28)
56
No
Collocates
Fre
MI
No
Collocates
Fre
MI
1
disturbance(s)
126
7.877
15
drain
8
3.693
2
public
107
7.236
16
health
7
4.065
3
generation(s)
44
4.019
17
lack
7
4.325
4
gap
42
4.099
18
main
7
4.47
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No
Collocates
Fre
MI
No
Collocates
Fre
MI
5
convenience
28
5.046
19
misunderstanding
7
5.976
6
pollution
23
4.939
20
environmental
6
3.683
7
problem(s)
33
3.497
21
harm
6
3.805
8
trouble(s)
22
5.897
22
interferes
6
5.094
9
brain
15
4.131
23
loss(es)
7
5.575
10
serious
13
4.559
24
terrible
6
4.954
11
bad
11
3.062
25
waste
6
3.711
12
phenomenon
11
4.996
26
disease(s)
9
4.895
13
social
10
4.146
27
effect
5
3.534
14
reasons
9
4.531
28
results
5
4.964
By using the same method, the collocates of cause were extracted from ABNC, 637
collocates were obtained and then their MI scores were computed. The high frequency
collocates of cause in ABNC are listed in the order of frequency in Table 4. Due to space
limitations, only the top 50 collocates are listed here.
Table 4. High frequency collocates of cause in ABNC (top 50)
No
collocates
Fre
MI
No
collocates
Fre
1
problem(s)
198
4.277
2
death(s)
163
5.022
3
damage(s)
154
4
effect
78
5
concern
6
injury(ies)
7
MI
26
stress
24
5.04
27
failure
24
3.926
6.392
28
factor(s)
24
3.44
4.304
29
distress
23
9.532
75
5.124
30
disruption(s)
23
6.827
72
5.792
31
confusion(s)
23
5.255
harm
62
6.592
32
rhythm(s)
22
4.92
8
serious
60
4.417
33
virus(es)
21
5.429
9
trouble(s)
49
4.568
34
driving
21
4.14
10
accident(s)
48
5.106
35
embarrassment
20
6.04
11
handicap(s)
46
6.033
36
erosion
19
5.409
12
disease(s)
46
4.924
37
root(s)
19
3.954
13
loss(es)
46
3.961
38
reckless
18
6.186
14
pain(s)
45
4.86
39
illness(es)
18
4.911
15
main
41
3.019
40
brain
17
4.001
16
difficulty(ies)
40
4.076
41
environmental
17
3.692
17
cancer(s)
39
5.754
42
resentment
16
6.183
18
offence(s)
36
4.752
43
sensation(s)
16
5.51
19
delay(s)
35
5.479
44
tension(s)
16
4.345
20
pollution
31
5.133
45
recession(s)
16
4.17
21
severe
27
5.006
46
casualties
15
5.892
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Lexical Acquisition Viewed from a Contrastive Analysis of Collocational Behavior of Near Synonyms
No
collocates
Fre
MI
No
collocates
Fre
MI
22
considerable
27
3.886
47
alarm
15
4.959
23
explosion(s)
26
5.539
48
unknown
15
4.578
24
infection(s)
26
5.009
49
symptom(s)
15
4.52
25
anxiety
25
5.293
50
suffering
15
3.85
As shown in Table 3, in the 28 collocates of cause in WECCL, there are 12 neutral collocates
(public, generation, gap, brain, phenomenon, social, reasons, health, main, environmental,
effect, results), 15 negative collocates and one positive collocate (convenience). In the top
50 collocates of cause in ABNC, as shown in Table 4, there are 8 neutral collocates (effect,
concern, main, considerable, factor(s), rhythm(s), root(s), sensation(s)), 42 negative collocates
and no positive collocate. It seems that negative collocates predominate in both corpora,
and Chinese EFL learners tend to use more neutral collocates than native speakers. A
closer look at their usage may be of help.
(a) Negative collocates. It can be seen from Tables 3 and 4 that in the native corpus,
a large number of negative collocates covers a wide range of negative semantic categories.
According to their semantic categories, the negative collocates can be divided into such
categories as “problems, difficulty”, “disease, death, injury, disability”, “accident, disaster,
scandal, riot”, “loss, failure, risk, mistake” and “bad mood, anxiety, pressure”. Even the
high frequency adjective collocates also possess negative meanings like serious, severe,
dangerous, grievous, dying, toxic, poisoning, fatal and upset. Learners demonstrate a similar
tendency to use negative collocates with cause, but use fewer categories than native
speakers. Eight high frequency negative collocates (pollution, problem(s), trouble(s), serious,
environmental, harm, disease(s) and loss) are used by both learners and native speakers.
The collocations consist of the node word and these collocates are in accordance with the
negative semantic prosody, so they can be called typical collocations of cause, the usage of
which demonstrates the nativeness of the learner language to a certain degree.
Some interesting differences can also be observed. The most frequently used collocate
by native speakers is problem(s), which is also frequently used by Chinese learners (among
the top 7). The most frequently used collocate by learners is disturbance(s),which is ranked
as top 74 on the list of high frequency collocates by native speakers. The most frequently
used adjective collocate by both native speakers and learners is serious. The second most
frequently used adjective collocate by learners is bad, which does not appear on the list
of collocates by native speakers. They tend to use main and then severe. Learners also use
some incorrect expressions like cause them oversee the shortcomings and causing to become
less and less important, which are still in accordance with the negative semantic prosody of
cause. Generally speaking, Chinese learners have basically acquired the semantic prosody of
cause and some typical collocations; they share 13 collocates with native speakers in their
28 high-frequency collocates. However, they still overuse some collocates which are not
frequently (or never) used by native speakers, like misunderstanding (two times in ABNC),
interferes (none in ABNC). Though these frequently used collocates are still in accordance
with the negative semantic prosody of cause, and grammatically correct, they do not
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PAN Fan
belong to typical collocations of cause. In essence, they are interlanguage collocations.
(b) Neutral collocates. Among the 12 neutral collocates (public, generation, gap,
brain, phenomenon, social, reasons, health, main, environmental, effect and results) used
by learners, generation, gap and brain seem to be neutral, but almost all of them are used
in the collocations of “generation gap” and “brain drain”, both negative in the context.
Environmental also looks like a neutral collocate, but without exception, the word is
used to refer to “environmental problems” when it is observed from its context. Another
interesting finding is that, result, seemingly a neutral word, is generally modified by bad
or serious whenever collocating with cause, thus demonstrates negative semantic prosody.
Here are some more examples:
attention paid on degree and certificate will cause
is good for their children. But it often cause
anything about them. Sometimes they may cause
evoke many people’s vanity, which cause
some serious results. First, college students
the opposite results. They will soon become
bad results and you life goes into disorder. In
many bad results against the original meaning
These examples show that some seemingly neutral collocates are not really neutral; they
still reveal negative semantic prosody in their context. They are not typical collocates
used by native speakers. Except main and effect, other collocates are not on the list of
200 collocates in ABNC, but Chinese English-major learners use these neutral collocates
frequently in their writing.
Observing reason and result in concordance lines of cause in WECCL, one can find
that they are mostly in collocations like “reason cause” or “cause result”. For example,
1) There are so many reasons cause this situation.
2) I think, it is one of important reasons of causing our country’s lag.
3) Maybe there are some reasons to cause this.
These expressions are rarely found in ABNC. When using cause and result together to
mean “something causes a bad result”, learners tend to use result in a vague way, without
providing any further information. But in ABNC, native speakers always give a detailed
description of result. This finding also helps to reveal the collocational differences between
Chinese English-major learners and native speakers. Like other types of learners, these
learners tend to use generic words and many non-native expressions in their writing.
(c) Positive collocates. It can be seen from Table 3 that, the only positive collocate
used by Chinese learners is convenience (28 occurrences). Some sample lines of convenience
collocating with cause in WECCL are as follows.
1
2
3
4
5
6
phone gives us great convenience, it will
us a lot of convenience, and it also
that despite its convenience, it often
in spite of its convenience, it usually
phone brings us much convenience, it also
disturbed. I think it's the side effect
cause
cause
cause
cause
cause
cause
us much more trouble if we don’t use it
a lot of trouble at the same time.
disturbances in public and interferes with
intrusion of people’s privacy and
many problems. In a word, we should
by its convenience, due to which other
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Lexical Acquisition Viewed from a Contrastive Analysis of Collocational Behavior of Near Synonyms
By observing the context of the 28 occurrences of convenience, one can discover the
semantic prosody distribution of cause: 24 negative, one positive and three neutral. In
the negative context, the use of convenience can be summarized as a pattern like “despite
(in spite of) its convenience, it often causes disturbance (trouble, disturbance, intrusion,
problems)”. In this sense, the use of convenience is fine. This finding reveals some
differences between Chinese English-major learners and non-English-major learners. By
comparing CLEC and COBULD, Wei (2002: 300-307) found that Chinese non-Englishmajor learners used a large number of apparently positive collocates with cause (e.g.,
safety, growth, progress, development and helping), which result in unusual collocations
and conflict with the semantic prosody of cause. But these positive words do not occur
in WECCL or they are not be considered as collocates of cause; that is, they do not meet
the minimum co-occurrence frequency of 5 and MI score of 3. English-major learners
use other positive words like convenience, applause, cheer and popularity, but with the
exception of convenience they cannot be considered as collocates of cause.
3.3 Comparison on High Frequency Collocates of Lead to
Searching lead to in WECCL in the same way as cause, only four high frequency collocates
(Freq≥5, MI>3) were found. These are listed in Table 5 in the order of frequency.
Table 5. High frequency collocates of lead to in WECCL(4)
No
Collocates
Fre
MI
No
Collocates
Fre
MI
1
success
7
6.647
3
result
6
5.251
2
job
7
4.859
4
bad
5
4.378
Searching lead to in ABNC in the same way, 266 high frequency collocates were found.
After calculating their MI scores, 45 collocates were obtained. Direction words like path(s),
lane, farms, rows and passage are eliminated from the list. These are listed in Table 6 in the
order of frequency.
Table 6. High frequency collocates of lead to in ABNC (40)
60
No
Collocates
Fre
MI
No
Collocates
Fre
MI
1
loss (es)
24
3.022
21
rejection
7
4.226
2
events
19
3.089
22
speculation
7
4.077
3
inevitably
18
4.658
23
suspension
7
4.323
4
collapse
15
4.45
24
confrontation(s)
6
4.234
5
decline
14
3.627
25
crash
6
3.613
6
formation
14
4.418
26
disagreement(s)
6
4.708
7
ultimate(ly)
13
3.518
27
errors
6
4.112
8
conclusion
11
3.656
28
expansion
6
3.054
9
confusion
11
4.277
29
infection
6
3.195
PAN Fan
No
Collocates
Fre
MI
No
Collocates
Fre
MI
10
factors
11
3.175
30
participation
6
3.346
11
suggestion(s)
11
4.03
31
removal
6
3.888
12
creation
10
3.346
32
skepticism
6
4.908
13
rapid
10
4.028
33
capitalism
5
3.569
14
coalition
9
4.155
34
clash(es)
5
3.709
15
establishment
9
3.485
35
destruction
5
3.099
16
adoption
8
4.337
36
deterioration
5
5.14
17
necessarily
8
3.009
37
downfall
5
5.725
18
severe
8
3.251
38
organizations
5
3.888
19
disaster
7
3.325
39
proliferation
5
5.514
20
improvement
7
3.135
40
theories
5
3.354
It can be seen from Tables 5 and 6 that, both Chinese learners and native speakers
use fewer lead to than cause. There are only four collocates of lead to in WECCL and
40 collocates in ABNC. There are two neutral collocates (job and result), one positive
collocate (success), one negative adjective collocate (bad) in WECCL (no negative noun
collocates was found). A look at the distribution of the collocates may imply that the
semantic prosody of lead to may be neutral. In ABNC, there are 20 neutral collocates, one
positive collocate (improvement) and 19 negative collocates of lead to (loss(es), collapse,
decline, confusion, severe, disaster, rejection, speculation, suspension, confrontation(s), crash,
disagreement(s), errors, infection, skepticism, clash(es), destruction, deterioration, and
downfall). Unlike cause, negative collocates of lead to do not predominate in the corpus
and cover fewer categories than those of cause. The distribution of the collocates also
shows that the semantic prosody of lead to tends to be neutral. The four collocates used by
Chinese English-major learners do not appear on the list of collocates by native speakers.
In other words, though these frequently used collocates by learners are still in accordance
with the semantic prosody of lead to and may be grammatically correct, they do not
belong to typical collocations of lead to. In essence, they are interlanguage collocations.
After comparisons of collocations of cause and lead to between two corpora are
made, it may seem also necessary to make a comparison on the use of cause and lead to
by the same group of speakers. This can be found easily from the comparison of Tables 3
and 5, lead to shares two collocates (result and bad) with cause among its four collocates in
WECCL. This shows that Chinese learners rely heavily on a limited number of words that
are not frequently used by native speakers. From the comparison between Tables 4 and 6,
it can be seen that cause and lead to share 15 collocates (loss(es), inevitably, collapse, decline,
ultimate(ly), confusion, factors, rapid, severe, disaster, crash, expansion, infection, destruction,
and deterioration).
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4. Summary of Findings and Discussion
It can also be seen from the overall distribution of semantic prosody that Chinese Englishmajor learners share similar semantic preferences with the native speakers when using
cause and lead to. The collocate comparison of cause between the two corpora shows
that, Chinese learners demonstrate a similar tendency to use negative collocates with
cause, and share 13 collocates with native speakers in their 28 high-frequency collocates.
These typical collocations of cause are in accordance with the negative semantic prosody,
the usage of which demonstrates a certain degree of nativeness of the learner language.
Generally speaking, Chinese English-major learners have acquired the semantic prosody of
cause and some typical collocations. Compared with Chinese non-English major learners
who use a large number of apparently positive collocates with cause, which cause unusual
collocations and conflict with the semantic prosody of cause, English-major learners have
apparently not used unusual collocations like cause development. This finding shows that
Chinese English-major learners have cultivated some awareness of semantic prosody.
One possible reason leading to this difference is that, English-major learners are exposed
to more authentic and a larger quantity of language materials than non-English-major
learners.
Compared with native speakers, Chinese English-major learners still manifest
certain non-nativeness in the underlying collocational patterns of these verbs. First,
they use some grammatically correct but non-native even wrong collocations. They
overuse some collocates which are not frequently (or never) used by native speakers, like
misunderstanding, interferes, bad, and result. Though these interlanguage collocations are
still in accordance with the negative semantic prosody of cause and grammatically correct,
they do not belong to typical collocations of cause. Learners also use some incorrect
expressions like cause them oversee the shortcomings and causing to become less and less
important. Second, Chinese learners use fewer categories of collocates than native speakers
when using both cause and lead to, and frequently use two collocates (result and bad) that
are not frequently used by native speakers. This may largely be attributed to the variety
of BNC data sources and the limit of writing topics of the learner corpus, but it also
shows that Chinese learners rely heavily on a limited choices of words with which they are
familiar. Compared with native speakers, learners are restricted to very limited vocabulary
and few semantic categories.
Three reasons may account for this. First, from the aspect of intralinguistic transfer,
because cause and lead to have meanings in Chinese like dailai, zaocheng, yinqi, chansheng,
and daozhi, learners may transfer the frequent collocates of these Chinese words directly to
English. This may explain why Chinese learners have used the collocates like convenience,
result, misunderstanding, and phenomenon that are rarely used by native speakers and used
incorrect expressions (e.g., causing China fell behind). Second, another possible explanation
may be that Chinese English teachers place more emphasis on grammar than on lexis, or
on the width of lexis instead of its breadth. Though English-major learners have more
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PAN Fan
exposure to authentic materials and a much larger quantity of language materials, they still
lack systematic training and guidance on collocation. They have only limited superficial
knowledge of lexical collocational patterns and do not realize the necessity of observing
underlying collocational patterns. Third, from the aspect of communication strategies,
avoiding unfamiliar collocations, learners tend to use high frequency words acquired in
their high school (mostly the first 1,000 words like result, reason, effect, and health), and
rarely use the relatively low frequency words acquired in college. This reveals a deficiency
in their lexical knowledge.
To improve the quality of the interlanguage of learners, Chinese teachers should first
shift their focus from teaching words to the teaching of word clusters. Teachers can extract
and teach clusters that can fully reflect typical collocations, and guide learners to learn
words from the aspect of collocation and foster their awareness of collocation. If learners
could understand and acquire typical collocations, the accuracy and nativeness of their
interlanguage would be greatly improved.
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(Copy editing: Julia HOFMANN)
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