4.3 Phraseology and meaning
4.3.5 Phraseology/collocation in learner language
In Section 3.3.2, we have already seen the challenges phraseology poses in language
teaching. This section will describe the roles of phraseology in learner language,
including how phraseologies are acquired and performed. In addition, I will also
116 collocations.
The role of phraseology has been agreed to lie at the core of successful language
learning. For instance, Wong-Fillmore (1976) notices the importance of acquiring
formulaic speech in language learning. The reasons why phraseology plays a crucial
role in learner language include: (1) phraseological units are a very common
phenomenon; (2) phraseology has special functions. The first reason is evidenced by
Howarth's (1996) estimation that in his corpus at least one third of the V+N
combinations are collocations. The second reason is shown in Nesselhauf (2005:2).
She summarises the functions of phraseological units from many researchers' work:
They contribute to the production of creative language and fluency, facilitating
comprehension and improving the users’ similarity/likeness as a linguistic group.
With respect to the learning of phraseology, foreign or second language learners
have a learning process which is very different from that which native speakers
experience. It has been observed that the foreign language learners acquire English
mainly from written input, in contrast to native speakers, who receive spoken input in
most occasions (Wible, 2008). Learners of English have to deal with several problems
such as unawareness of native-like selections and the opaqueness/restrictions of
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There is psychological and neurological evidence supporting the existence of
formulaic language (see the summary by Weinert, 1995:185). The use of
phraseologies, formulaic languages or prefabricated routines has already been
observed widely in many first language studies, but they are also found present in L2.
Foreign language learners have been observed to utilise formulaic units as strategies
to achieve their communicative goals (Wray, 2002:178-183). They make use of
formulaic wholes in the earlier stages and progress into analysed elements later
(Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992; Weinert, 1995; Schmitt & Carter, 2004).
Although L2 learners advance in proficiency, they fail to master the formulaicity
of the target language. As noted by Yorio (1989), they make errors by inappropriately
clustering words together; this was ascribed to their lack of competence in recognising
the restrictions imposed on strings of words. Other research reports that L2 learners
combine collocations, which are not natural co-occurrences or under-use formulaic
units (Dechert & Lennon, 1989; Granger, 2005a). Therefore, L2 learners may achieve
‘native-like fluency’, but they still lack the ability of ‘native-like selection’ (Pawley &
Syder, 1983). To conclude, unlike L1 learners who acquire languages with large units
in the initial stages, L2 learners start with individual words, leading to difficulties in
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non-idiomatic sequences because they have ‘too much choice’(Wray, 2002:206).
Interest in phraseologies in learner languages has led to a surge of work on
collocations or the grammatical-lexical patterns of one specific verb, such as that
conducted by Altenberg and Granger (2001). Below I will focus on studies of
collocations in learner language which are corpus-based in principle. Collocations,
especially the restricted collocations in learner language, have been scrutinized by
researchers such as Howarth (1996, 1998, 2005), Nesselhauf (2003, 2005), and Cross
and Papp (2008), among many others. These studies have mainly investigated the
collocations of the V + N constructions, with a focus on anomalous or erroneous
combinations. General findings on collocation, with particular relevance to
restrictions, are summarised in Nesselhauf (2005:8), where she concludes that learners
tend to fall prey to restrictions which control what can and cannot be combined, at the
same time. Other individual results often display specific learner performance, for
example, Cross and Papp (2008:26) examine a Chinese English corpus and find that
Chinese learners show a larger error rate in the use of verbs with prepositions in
comparison with Greek and German learners.
The studies of collocations (two-word combination) undertaken by Howarth
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investigates the verb+noun collocations in one register (academic writing) produced
by native and non-native writers of various L1s. His results show that learners make
less use of restricted collocations than do native writers. He also claims that learners’
general proficiency levels are not in correlation with their collocation performance. In
another study, Howarth (2005:177) presents a similar report, where he states that
“native speakers employ about 50 per cent more restricted collocations and idioms...
than learners do, on average”. Learners are found to be able to manage the idioms and
free combinations (both ends of the idiomaticity spectrum) at an advanced level, but
they are less aware of the mechanisms of the restricted collocations which lie in
between. To reach native standard, Howarth concludes, the learners thus must be able
to choose appropriate grammatical and lexical items, and select conventional
collocations.
Nesselhauf (2003) examines the verb-noun collocations in the German subcorpus
of ICLE produced by advanced English learners. The non-standard collocations are
singled out by native speakers, and judged as to their acceptability. By doing so, the
mistake types can be identified and the impact of the restriction of a collocation can
be detected. The most common mistake types found are the wrong choice of verb and
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with those collocations which have a medium degree of restriction, that is, “the verb
takes a wider range of nouns” (Nesselhauf, 2003:233). In addition, the role of their
first language is demonstrated to have great impact on their use of collocations. To
make a full presentation of her study, Nesselhauf (2005) publishes a book which
discusses the findings at length. Overall, the learners are found to be in line with
Kaszubski’s (2000) finding that they tend to use fewer restricted collocations in
comparison with native users. However, they also overuse some types of collocation
that are deemed ‘safe’.
With an aim to explore the proportion of phraseological units in the native and
non-native writings, Kaszubski’s (2000) thesis reports on Polish learners’ idiomatic
performance based on six core verbs (be, do, have, make, take, give). The collocations
are divided into groups of frozen, restricted and free combinations. According to her
analysis, learners’ language is characterised by less use of idiomatic expressions than
that of native users. The more advanced the learners are, the more idiomatic
collocations can be found (Kaszubski, 2000:243). Another study undertaken by
Wiktorsson (2002) on Swedish learners arrives at the same conclusion: the more
proficient learners can display a higher quantity of multi-word combinations.
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chosen to study collocations such as adverbs. For instance, Granger (2005a) studies
amplifiers which end with -ly and function as modifiers, such as perfectly natural. In
general, fewer amplifiers are used by French-speaking learners, and some of them,
such as completely, totally are overused by the learners as ‘safe bets’, when compared
with the natives (Granger, 2005a:148). Among the learners’ collocations, the majority
are not native-like; in other words, they are never used by native speakers. She further
categorises them into two sub-groups: maximisers (e.g. totally, entirely) and boosters
(e.g. highly, strongly). There is not much difference in quantity found in the group of
maximisers, whereas the boosters are used far more by the natives. Above all, a strong
influence of the learners’ L1 is revealed in her data: the congruent collocations (the
English combination has a direct translation equivalent in French) are found to be the
learners' favourite choices. The equivalent in their L1 naturally enhances the learners’
confidence in making use of its English counterpart.
Because these above-mentioned studies all focus on the product of learner
language, none of them concerns the phraseology in the input for the learners to learn.
Durrant (2008) conducts lab-based and corpus-based research in his thesis to tackle
this problem. In the lab-based study, the subjects (learners) are trained by reading
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do a recall test to examine their memory retention. It is concluded that the learners are
able to pick up and ‘learn’ these collocations from the input they were exposed to. The
second, corpus-based, approach yields evidence that learners are more conservative in
using new, coined collocations (Durrant, 2008:174). In accordance with the previous
studies, the results also demonstrate that learners can use as many collocations as
natives, but they tend to rely on some favoured types of collocation. Another crucial
finding is that the non-idiomaticity of the non-native language may be a consequence
of the learners’ lack of the “lower-frequency but strongly-associated” collocations
(Durrant, 2008:183), but not the high-frequency collocations, as generally assumed.
Guo’s (2006:196-220) research also provides implications for this present study.
His research is based on COLEC, a subcorpus of CLEC. COLEC consists of only
examination essays while CLEC comprises more genres. Both corpora collect
writings by Chinese students at similar level (from middle school to university), but
differ slightly in that COLEC does not include writings from English-major students
(Guo, 2006). He looks into the context of the combinations such as take action, take
place, and take on. Since my thesis aims to probe phrasal verbs, his analysis of take
on is of particular relevance here and worth some discussion. It is found that only
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learners do not have the full range of the usage of this PV at their disposal. He
concludes that, as has been suggested by many previous studies, natives have the
advantage of using more varied types of collocation, but learners are characterised by
their limited and repeated uses of a few collocations (Guo, 2006:217).
4.4
Summary
As the previous sections illustrate, the terminologies that pertain to phraseology have
been very complex and somewhat hinder the reconciliation of different theories.
Although I agree that providing the basic information of the MWU in question is
necessary, I feel that giving each term a rigorous definition does not help to clarify the
fuzziness; on the contrary, it sometimes adds more opaqueness. Moreover, more
recent research has suggested that many newly discovered phraseological units should
be subsumed in the range of phraseology to increase its breadth of coverage, against
the traditional view which is conservative in delimiting phraseological units.
Therefore, in this thesis, many sub-terms are used interchangeably to avoid confusion,
and at the same time allow more possibilities to be uncovered.
The notion of phraseology can be summarised by two important synopses given
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Prefabricated expressions pervade all levels of linguistic organization--lexical, grammatical, pragmatic—and affect all kinds of structures, from entire utterances to simple phrases ... there are relatively few examples that are completely invariable or opaque.
His observation provides intriguing implications for the study of phraseology.
First, since the phraseological elements are not limited in their function and size, the
borderline of investigation can be broken, and the main concern of phraseology in
language studies can extend across levels. Secondly, the flexibility/variability of
certain slots in a phraseological unit should require more consideration than
previously thought.
These implications are reflected in the work led by Sinclair, and followed by
Hunston and Francis and others. Studies of phraseology such as Sinclair’s (1991,
1996, 1999) and ‘pattern grammar’ (Hunston & Francis, 1999) have shown that there
are systematic regularities of words, grammar and even meanings which display
predictable patterns in a language. Their view of phraseology is not narrow:
non-compositionality is not an essential criterion to define phraseology. Moreover, the
parts that contribute to forming one meaning are taken as a group which can comprise
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this present thesis makes an attempt to explore whether the regularities of MWUs can
be found in learner language and to investigate whether learner language has the same
patterns in regard to one MWU in the native English.
In the field of learner language, the role of phraseology has been centralised with
the development of corpus studies. Nonetheless, scant attention has been paid to the
issues of associations/co-selections. As a result, this thesis is situated within a broader
scope of phraseology. It considers the commonly studied collocations, and also
extends to the more abstract notions such as multiple-word combinations, semantic
sequences (Hunston, 2008) and semantic associations (Hoey, 2005), etc. The
examination of these phenomena is believed to manifest the discrepancy of
idiomaticity in the learner language, and will help the researchers to capture more
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