Collocation Deficiency in a Learner Corpus of English : From an Overuse Perspective

Collocational deficiency is a pervasive phenomenon in learner English. Language learners often fail to choose the correct combination of two or more words due to their unawareness of collocational properties in vocabulary. They are apt to adopt lexical simplification strategies such as using a synonymous or Ll-influenced expression. This paper presents a corpus-based study on the collocational deficiency of Taiwanese learners of English. The work utilizes two pre-tagged corpora, Taiwanese Learner Corpus of English and British National Corpus, to examine the learner's use of collocations over a set of synonymous words: big, large, great. The experimental findings indicate that among the three words the collocations with big are significantly overused by the learners when it is used to refer to abstract concepts. This overuse phenomenon is further investigated and it is found that the collocations of high frequency in the learner English tend to be used to express vague ideas when more specific meanings should be conveyed. It is also found that the learners are apt to apply those collocations to the cases where more concise expressions are preferred. Another finding shows that problematic collocations, pertaining to big, large and great, are produced as the result of learner's application of the Ll-transfer and synonym strategies, which the Taiwanese learners commonly adopt for lexical simplification.