The Use of ‘Delexical Verb + Noun’ Collocations by the Korean and Chinese EFL Learners: A Corpus-Based Study

The Use of ‘Delexical Verb + Noun’ Collocations by the Korean and Chinese EFL Learners: A Corpus-Based Study

The acquisition of appropriate combinations of delexical verbs and their object nouns (e.g., make a mistake vs. do/have a mistake) is known to be difficult for L2 learners of English largely due to arbitrariness in association between the verbs and the object nouns. The researchers aimed to deepen our understanding of the nature of this learning difficulty by analyzing Korean and Chinese learners written corpora in regard to the frequency and error patterns of delexical verb + noun collocations for the six typical light verbs (do, get, give, have, make, and take). A native written corpus was used to establish the target norm for the use of the target constructions. The overall results show that both Chinese and Korean EFL learners, as compared with English L1 writers, used a limited number of target constructions repeatedly, revealing a lack of collocational knowledge as to delexical verbs. More specific analyses on individual verbs present both similarities and differences across the individual verbs and the three groups of writers, suggesting that the degree of difficulty in acquiring delexical verb + noun collocations could be modulated by the frequency with which they appear in the input and how their meanings are lexically represented in the learners’ L1.