（英语语言文学专业论文）基于中国学生口语语料库的动名词搭配研究.pdf

基于中国学生口语语料库的动名词搭配研究 iv 摘摘 要要 英语搭配是衡量英语学习者英语水平的一个重要方面。然而，对 于中国英语学习者而言，英语搭配一直是一个难点。在过去的 20 年 里， 国内外的语言学者运用语料库语言学的方法和理念对词语的搭配 进行了卓有成效的研究。但是，针对中国学生口语中的搭配研究还相 当少。鉴于此，本文对中国学生英语口语中的动名词搭配特点进行了 一项实证研究， 旨在探讨中国学生在口语测试中使用的动名词搭配的 特点，从而对英语教学提出建议。 本研究拟回答以下三个问题： 1、在英语专业四级口试中，学生使用的动名词搭配的分布有何 特点？ 2、英语专业学生的动名词搭配能力与口语成绩是否相关？ 3、与本族语者相比，中国学生在使用动名词搭配时有什么异同 点？ 本次研究的数据来源于中国学生口语语料库seccl，共抽取100 个案例，按照全国英语专业四级口语测试成绩分成高、低两组。通过 数据统计分析，有以下主要发现： 1. 抽样的语料中，学生使用了大约2000个动名词组合，包括 45.8%的自由组合，43%的动名词搭配，错误动名词搭配约占11.2%。 结果显示学生倾向使用的动名词搭配变体缺乏多样性， 使用较多简单 的词汇。 2.英语专业学生口语得分与出现的动名词搭配的频数显著相关， 与错误搭配频数负相关，但未达到显著水平。即搭配使用频数高的语 料， 其得分也较高， 但高分组语料中不恰当的搭配的频数未必一定低， 因为低分组倾向于频繁、重复使用简单搭配、避免使用复杂搭配，所 以错误搭配的频数未必过高。 3.通过与本族语者对比，发现中国学生由于受到母语负迁移的影 南京航空航天大学硕士学位论文 v 响，对搭配词的选择与本族语者存在显著差异。 以上发现对英语专业口语教学和学习具有重要意义， 基于研究结 果，笔者提出以下三个建议：提高老师和学生的搭配意识；在口语课 堂中通过相关练习增加搭配知识的输入； 提倡学习者利用本族语者的 口语语料库并使用相关计算机软件，增加接触真实英语的机会，发现 词汇的搭配特点。 本实验只是对英语口语中动名词搭配的一次尝试性研究， 实验设 计及分析方面难免存在不足，这都有待于进一步研究和探讨。 关键词：关键词：英语口语语料库; 动名词搭配；频数；口语水平；启示 基于中国学生口语语料库的动名词搭配研究 ii abstract collocation is important for the achievement of native-like competence. it has been recognized as one of the ways that differentiate native speakers from foreign language learners. in the past 20 years, corpus-based researches on collocation have achieved a lot at home and abroad. however，researches and literature on the features of collocations in chinese efl learners oral production are rather limited. this empirical study is designed to explore the characteristics of verb-noun collocations produced by chinese english majors in spoken english tests. based on the data from spoken english corpus of chinese learners (seccl), the current study aims at addressing the following research questions: 1. how are the verb-noun collocations distributed in the speeches produced by the test-takers in tem-4 oral tests? 2. is the english majors collocation competence correlated with their speaking proficiency? if so, is the correlation significant? 3. are there any similarities and differences between chinese-speaking learners and native speakers verb-noun collocational behaviors? the major findings of the study are as follows: firstly, of almost 2,000 verb-noun combinations produced, about 45.8% of them can be considered as free combinations, 43% restricted collocations and approximately 11.2% incorrect collocations. secondly, there is a significant difference between high group and low group students in their collocation competence. the collocation competence increases as overall speaking proficiency develops, but the occurrence of incorrect collocations in speech might exert a negative influence on the speaking quality, but not to a significant level. thirdly, it has been found that the chinese learners uses of the chosen verb and noun in verb-noun collocation pattern are significantly different from those of the native speakers, and that the chinese learners typical expression 南京航空航天大学硕士学位论文 iii can often be traced back to the expressions in chinese when the chinese equivalent of the verb or noun is used. three suggestions are proposed in regard to teaching and learning collocations: raising both teachers and learners awareness of collocation; teaching and learning collocations in oral classes; utilizing the native speaker corpora accompanied by its corresponding computer program. keywords: spoken english corpus, verb-noun collocations, speaking proficiency, frequency, implication 基于中国学生口语语料库的动名词搭配研究 viii list of tables table 4.1 testing items in tem-4 oral test.20 table 5.1 overall results of verb-noun collocations between two groups.27 table 5.2 most frequently used free combinations by high group.28 table 5.3 most frequently used free combinations by low group.28 table 5.4 group statistics in free combination frequency for hg without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”, having a large vocabulary is highly desired by efl learners. however, compared with the time and energy spent on lexical learning, the progress made in the improvement of communicative competence is far from satisfactory. for the majority of chinese students, english speaking still remains the most difficult skill for them to master. according to a survey conducted by li ruifang in qinghua university in 2004, about 48 percent of the students said that they most wanted to improve “speaking” skills, 28.8 percent of them took “listening”, 14.4 percent “writing” and 8.8 percent “reading” as the first skill to be improved. the fact that it is urgent for efl learners to improve their oral proficiency calls for new approaches to the teaching and learning of speaking (li, 2004). why are chinese learners still weak at speaking even after so many years systematic language learning? the answer lies in the nature of vocabulary knowledge which is more than just getting acquainted with word forms or labels but implies “becoming familiar with (new) meanings, concepts and meaning relations of known words” (verhallen, 1998:19). a words collocational knowledge is an important indicator of vocabulary knowledge as mccarthy stated “the relationship of collocation is fundamental in the study of vocabulary; it is a marriage contract between words, and some words are more firmly married to each other than others” (mccarthy, 1990:88). a psycholinguistic approach to language processing mechanism may provide 基于中国学生口语语料库的动名词搭配研究 2 more insights in this field. the mind can store vast amounts of knowledge in the long-term memory, but is only able to process small amounts of it in real time, as when one is speaking. in effect, the mind makes use of a relatively abundant resource (long-term memory) to compensate for a relative lack in another (processing capacity) by storing a number of frequently-needed lexical chunks as whole units. these can be easily retrieved and used without the need to compose them on-line through word selection and grammatical sequencing (carter, 1998). drawing on their mental lexicon, native speakers are able to produce fluent language. because the use of lexical phrases lessens the cognitive load, they are able to concentrate on the content and organization of what they want to say (schmitt nesselhauf, 2004; deng, 2004). however, collocations occurring in a spoken corpus can be assumed to differ from those in a written one, and those in a non-native (nns) corpus might differ from those in a native speaker (ns) one (leonardo, 2004). the current study proposes this corpus-based investigation of specific and prevalent verb-noun collocations in oral english by chinese efl learners as good knowledge of collocations is essential for fluent and natural-sounding english. then why do we choose the verbs to be the subject of our research? firstly, 南京航空航天大学硕士学位论文 3 verbs have long been treated as the center of a sentence. in many schools of grammar, such as traditional grammar, structure and case grammar, the verb is regarded as the most important part of the sentences. secondly, the data of previous studies have revealed that the verb-noun collocation pattern occupies the largest portion in the learners collocation production. as shown by the statistics based on the chinese learner english corpus, among the categories of collocation (cc) errors, cc3 (verb-noun collocation) becomes most prominent (gui, 2002:45). finally, verbs are frequent, notoriously difficult for learners, and since they “tend to form the core of communicative utterances where the most important information is placed” (nesselhauf, 2005:9) the present study attempts to shed some light on the collocations employed by chinese learners majoring in english. it reports a study of verb-noun collocations in spoken english tests by chinese-speaking learners. the reference corpus is the micase-michigan corpus of academic spoken english, which contains 1,848,364 words of spoken english, all by native speakers. the study is exploratory to a large degree due to the lack of previous studies in china. the first part briefly introduces the corpus and corpus linguistics. the second part offers a general survey of the various studies of collocation. the third part provides the research methodology. chapter four presents research data analysis and result discussion, including the following aspects: the distribution of verb-noun collocations in the speeches produced by the test-takers in tem-4 oral tests, the relation between the speaking score and the collocation competence, and the similarities and differences between chinese-speaking learners and native speakers verb-noun collocational behaviors. the last part sums up the major findings and puts forward some suggestions for the teaching and learning of collocations. 基于中国学生口语语料库的动名词搭配研究 4 chapter two corpus and corpus linguistics in recent years, a significant amount of research has been conducted on how computers can facilitate language teaching and learning. one specific area that is becoming more and more prominent and influential is corpus linguistics, recently revolutionized by large scale machine-readable corpora. the influence of corpus is widely felt in the field of linguistics and other closely related areas, not because it is a trend to follow, but because the corpus approach offers researchers new opportunities to solve problems that could not be solved before in these fields by other approaches (pu, 2000). linguists have always needed sources of evidence for theories about the elements, structures and functions of language, thus stating what is possible in a language. instead of intuition or introspection from experimentation or elicitation, and from descriptions based on observations of spoken or written texts, a language corpus can provide language researchers and learners with evidence derived directly from naturally-occurring or genuine texts. this chapter offers a brief survey of the corpus and corpus linguistics. we will begin with the definition of corpus and corpus linguistics. 2.1 definition of corpus and corpus linguistics the word “corpus”, derived from the latin word meaning “body”, may be used to refer to any text in written or spoken form. this research follows the definition by richard, “a corpus is a collection of materials that has been made for a particular purpose, such as a set of textbooks which are being analyzed and compared or a sample of sentences or utterances which are being analyzed for their linguistic features.”(richard whereas the least frequency prepositional collocates are behind, on, without and across. the computer can also be asked to provide an additional context, that is, a word in the longer environment, where it is used. a longer environment enables the user to better observe how a key word is used in an environment of the whole sentence. if we click view in the figure above, the contexts of the keyword haunt will be shown in the following figure. 基于中国学生口语语料库的动名词搭配研究 10 figure 2.3 the context of the keyword haunt the computerized corpus, with sufficient, authentic, typical and naturally occurring data, enables users to conduct comprehensive and overall research on collocations. the corpus-based approach depends on both quantitative and qualitative techniques. corpora are exploited for quantitative (absolute and relative frequency of occurrence) information. quantitative analysis is frequency-based. usually in quantitative analysis, observed linguistic features are classified, counted, and explained statistically. some simple or complex charts or models are often constructed to show certain tendencies and indicate what occurrences are common or rare. in addition, based on the frequencies shown in the charts or models, comparisons of some linguistic features between different corpora become possible. corpora are also exploited for qualitative (distribution of occurrence) information. qualitative analysis focuses on the typical features of the data being studied. after quantitative analysis is made and the frequencies of the given linguistic features are shown, this analysis is often adopted to describe the commonplace, variation or distinction of the given linguistic features shown in the charts or models. both techniques ensure what are the genuine reflections of the behaviors of a language or variety and what are merely accidental occurrences. 南京航空航天大学硕士学位论文 11 chapter three a general survey of collocation in this section, we shall review the definition of collocation, its role played in oral proficiency, and several studies conducted by researchers around the world that helped us formulate our theory and generate our research proposals. 3.1 what is collocation? collocation is a term used in lexicology by some linguists to refer to the habitual co-occurrences of individual lexical items. j. r. firth, though not the first one that mentioned “collocation”, is incontestably responsible for bringing the term into prominence in lexical studies. he (1957: 97) defines it this way: “collocations are actual words in habitual company”. according to j. r. firth, we “know a word by the company it keeps” and the “keeping company” he called “collocation”. the term designates the co-occurrence or syntagmatic combination of lexical items (or lexemes) (lipka, 1990). it is the way words combine in a language to produce natural-sounding speech and writing. the term collocation has been used and understood in many different ways. we shall give a brief account of the ways the term is defined as follows: a) the tendency of two or more words to co-occur in discourse (schmitt, 2000:76); b) a group of words which occur repeatedly in a language (carter, 1998:51); c) associations of two or more lexemes (root) recognized in and defined by their occurrence in a specific range of grammatical construction (cowie, 1994:3169); d) any recurring sequences of words (kennedy, 1990); e) the working definition of collocation is presented as follows: collocation is the recurrent co-occurrence of two or more words (particularly, nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) in a certain grammatical pattern (pu, 2003:79) 基于中国学生口语语料库的动名词搭配研究 12 from the above definitions, we can see that, though there are some slightly differences, two common characteristics are crucial to understanding the notion of collocationfirst, the words co-occur, and the second is that these words are used together exclusively (cowie, 1983; mccarty, 1990; schmitt, 2000). that goes like: collocations are “syntagmatic lexical relations” (lipka, 1990:166). collocations are restricted by semantic, as well as grammatical rules. lipka thinks that the concept of collocation has certain advantages for capturing syntagmatic relations between lexical elements (ibid). just as different linguistic experts have defined collocation from different perspectives, collocations can also be classified in different ways. for example, according to the collocative strength, it can be grouped into free combinations, restricted collocations and idioms. based on the linguistic element and function, it can fall into grammatical collocation and lexical collocation. it can also be divided into different patterns according to its forms or formal structures. due to the interest of this paper, we will mainly discuss the first related classification, which has been frequently quoted and extensively recognized by professionals: free combinations refer to the combinations of two or more words in which the elements are used in their literal sense. each component may be substituted, without affecting the meaning of the other, for example, buy a book, buy a house, sell a company, offer a job. almost every word in the combination can be substituted without necessarily affecting the meaning of the rest. (yang, 2002) restricted collocations are “combinations in which one component is used in its literal meaning, while the others are used in a specialized sense. the specialized meaning of one element can be figurative, de-lexical or in some way technical and is an important determinant of limited collocability at the other.” the combinations are, however, fully motivated, for example, a broad hint, a heavy smoker, an overwhelming majority, a constructive criticism, concreted efforts, flawless english, 南京航空航天大学硕士学位论文 13 address an issue, adopt a policy, build a reputation, draw a conclusion, earn an academic degree, fight corruption, present a paper.(ibid: 93) “idiom are combinations which function as a single lexical items and have a unitary meaning that can not be derived from the meanings of the components.(wei, 1999:40) in other words, it is structurally frozen and semantically opaque, for example, “kick the bucket” meaning “die”. unlike free combinations and restricted combinations, they permit no substitution and resist reordering their parts. one thing to be pointed out is that there is no clear-cut between free combinations, restricted collocations and idioms. they in fact form a cline and there is much overlapping in between as is shown in the following figure. figure 3.1 relations between free combinations, restricted collocations and idioms since the idioms are rarely used by test-takers in their oral production, they are excluded in this study. and free combinations, restricted collocations and incorrect collocations are included in this thesis. however, we have to admit that in spite of the broad agreement on the definition of collocation, at the present moment, there seems to be no one hundred percent reliable criterion for distinguishing restricted collocation from free combinations and