Delexical Verbs Research Articles

An Analysis of L1 Influence of Delexical Verbs Collocations on Turkish EFL Learners’ Performances

Mainly involving congruent and non-congruent collocations across English and Turkish, this study aimed to examine EFL learners’ performances in associating the given delexical verbs collocations between English and Turkish. The study involved a corpus-based selection of delexical verbs collocations. Data were collected from 43 participants who were applied a translation test with 24 items. The findings were examined according to error analysis. Employing a mixed method design, the study involved descriptive analysis of learners' scores, sources of learners’ errors, and an evaluation of L1 influence on learners’ test results. The findings showed that EFL learners’ score was higher with congruent delexical verbs collocations compared to non-congruent collocations. The findings also elicited L1 transfer had influence on EFL learning and assumed similarity might cause errors in associating verb collocations with their target language equivalents. The study offers some significant implications for both the learners and language instructors.

Language Transfer in Chinese EFL Learners’ Receptive Vocabulary Knowledge of Delexical and Lexical Verb+Noun Collocations

Restricted verb+noun collocations in English comprise delexical verb+noun collocations and lexical verb+noun collocations. The former are combinations containing verbs with ‘light’ meaning, such as make a mistake, take pictures, and have dinner, while lexical verb+noun collocations refer to combinations with technical meaning or figurative sense, such as draw a conclusion and hold discussions. Many studies have shown that these collocations are challenging to non-native English speakers, but to what extent and why one type is more challenging than the other has not received much research attention. The current study focuses on Chinese EFL learners’ receptive knowledge of delexical and lexical verb+noun collocation, particularly in relation to the influence of their first language (L1). To address this, the study measured Chinese EFL learners’ receptive knowledge of delexical and lexical verb+noun collocations using COLLEX5 collocation test and the extent to which their responses in the test were congruent or incongruent with their L1, i.e., Mandarin. The results show that Chinese EFL learners’ receptive delexical verb+noun collocation knowledge is higher than their lexical ones. The results also show that 92.3% of delexical verb+noun collocation errors are congruent with Mandarin. L1 influence is also evident in lexical verb+noun collocation errors but to a lesser extent, i.e., 72.6%. These findings indicate that L1-influenced errors account for a significant portion of the errors, suggesting that EFL learners' L1 influences how L2 collocations are processed in the mental lexicon.

An Error Analysis of Collocation Patterns of Delexical Verbs in Chinese EFL Earners’ Writing

English writing skill has always been the weak point of Chinese EFL learners, how to improve English writing skill is the focus of the education circle. In addition, the appropriate use of verb can polish the writing paper. Furthermore, the frequently-adopted delexical verbs play an important role in the English sentence structure. The collocation patterns of delexical verbs deserve us put more attention. Through the analysis of the CLEC corpora, this paper found the main features of the incorrect use of the delexical verbs and investigated the reason as well as provide some pedagogical implications.

Delexical Get + Noun Collocations in Argumentative Essays Written by Korean Learners of English

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of delexical verb get + noun collocations by Korean learners of English focusing on the frequency of the construction, semantic fields of the noun collocates, and types and sources of collocational errors. Toward this end, delexical get + noun collocations in the Korean subcorpus of ICLE were analyzed in comparison with those in the control corpus LOCNESS. Results showed that the Korean learners overused the delexical get + noun combinations compared with their native speaker peers. The two groups also revealed discrepancy in the use of noun collocates belonging to different seman0211219ic fields. In terms of types of deviant collocations, usage in verbs, determiners, numbers, and nouns were particularly problematic for the learners. Deviant collocations were attributable to the inextricable intertwining of L1 influence, intralingual development, and target language input.

Comparative Study of Delexical Verbs in an EFL Learner Corpus

Focusing on the delexical-verb construction, the present study aims at analyzing the essays by Korean college students and comparing the data with those from corpora of native speakers of English. Korean EFL college students are assumed to underuse or misuse the delexical verb structure compared with that of native speakers of English. Results reveal that Korean college EFL learners not only underuse the target structure but also use different nouns preceded by the target verbs. The study also conducts a test of verb phrase preference to see if the participants prefer a single verb to multi-word forms with delexical verbs. It finds that the participants regardless of their proficiency prefer to use a single-verb form rather than a multi-word form. From these results, the study concludes that L2 teachers should pay more attention to the collocation constructions with delexical verbs in their teaching and materials and they need to take a more explicit approach to teaching collocations. Several pedagogical suggestions such as concordancing activities are also made to raise Korean EFL learners’ awareness of delexical-verb structures in general.

The Effects of Explicit Instruction on the Acquisition of Collocations in an EFL Setting: Focusing on Delexical Verbs

The Effects of Explicit Instruction on the Acquisition of Collocations in an EFL Setting: Focusing on Delexical Verbs

A Corpus-based Research on High Frequency Delexical Verb Collocations: English Textbooks and National English Listening Tests

A Corpus-based Research on High Frequency Delexical Verb Collocations: English Textbooks and National English Listening Tests

Ying Wang, The Idiom Principle and L1 Influence: A contrastive learner-corpus study of delexical verb + noun collocations.

This article reviews The Idiom Principle and L1 Influence: A contrastive learner-corpus study of delexical verb + noun collocations 9789027210746

The Use of Make in a Korean Learner Spoken Corpus

The present study explores the various uses of the high-frequency verb ‘make’ by Korean learners of English. Specifically, we focus on the usage of this verb revealed in a Korean learner spoken corpus and compare its result with the native English speaker corpus (SBCSAE) and a Korean learner written corpus (Kim, 2002). A combination of manual and computer-aided approaches using software called AntConc 3.5.8 is used for analysis. The results demonstrate that there are significant differences in the usage of ‘make’ in the two spoken corpora under study. Specifically, while Korean learners tend to overgeneralize the causative and productive meaning of ‘make’, the preferred use of ‘make’ among English speakers is the delexical one. In addition, the frequency of productive meaning of ‘make’ by the Korean learners of English is noticeably higher as compared to the results of the written corpora. Taken together, the results of the present study allow us to draw the following two conclusions. First, in speaking, Korean learners use ‘make’ differently from native English speakers; second, the Korean learners’ uses of ‘make’ in speaking are significantly different from those in writing. Moreover, the current study implies pedagogical implications. That is, students should be given a corpus-driven teaching to learn how to use high-frequency delexical verbs correctly occurring in natural contexts, comparing native English speaker spoken corpus. (Incheon National University)

BNC 구어체 자료를 활용한 영어 탈어휘동사구문의 사용양상과 의미유형분석

The aim of this study is to identify the pattern of the delexical constructions and semantic coherence between delexical verbs and nouns. The semantics of the delexical verb constructions is analyzed focusing on do, give, have, make and take retrieved from the spoken texts of the British National Corpus. The result indicates that the forms identical to those of the main verbs are preferred to the derived forms and among the constructions of have and make are preferred among the delexical verbs combined to the same nouns. Five semantic categories, such as sensory, physical, mental, goal-oriented, and result-driven activities are suggested to classify the semantics of the nouns in the constructions.

A Corpus-Based Study on “Delexical Verb + Noun” Collocations Made by Korean Learners of English

Collocation is one of the essential elements that must be acquired in the second language classroom to reach an advanced level of English proficiency. However, L2 learners of English tend to have difficulty in using native-like collocations. It has been reported that “delexical verb + noun” collocations are particularly difficult for L2 learners from various L1 backgrounds, owing to the fact that delexical verbs are characterized by little or depleted meaning. The present study uses corpus-based analyses to investigate how Korean learners of English use delexical collocations. It compares a learner corpus comprising essays written by Korean university students with a native speaker corpus as a control. The findings of a quantitative analysis indicate that Korean learners significantly underuse delexical collocations and that it would be hard for them to reach a native-like command with regard to this language element. The findings of a qualitative analysis show that Korean learners make quite a few collocational errors with delexical verbs, and that these errors seem to be caused by both interlingual and intralingual influences. These results offer meaningful pedagogic implications for language teachers and researchers in the field of English language teaching.

A Frequency Analysis of Delexical Verb get in Listening Transcripts of English Textbooks and Authentic Spoken Data

A Frequency Analysis of Delexical Verb get in Listening Transcripts of English Textbooks and Authentic Spoken Data

English

Research into delexical structures is not common in Thailand and is in fact a neglected area of investigation despite the fact that knowledge of collocations can improve language competence. This study investigated the learning strategies that caused deviant delexical-verb use by Thai EFL learners. The study was undertaken with two groups of Thai EFL learners of differing English proficiencies who completed a 20-item gap-filling translation test and participated in an interview. The results revealed that learners relied on three major learning strategies - native language transfer, synonymy, and overgeneralisation that could lead to uncommon and deviant use of English delexical structures by learners. It was also discovered that both high and low proficiency learners were most familiar with the delexical verb take. The study also revealed that teachers of English should consider the significant role of these strategies when preparing English collocations and lessons on delexical verbs. Keywords: delexical verb; delexical structure; collocation; learning strategies; learner errors

Effects of Collaborative Corpus-Based Learning on the Acquisition and Retention of Delexical Verb Collocation

Effects of Collaborative Corpus-Based Learning on the Acquisition and Retention of Delexical Verb Collocation

영어와 한국어 탈어휘동사구문의 쌍방향 대응관계 연구

영어와 한국어 탈어휘동사구문의 쌍방향 대응관계 연구

A Corpus-based investigation into Korean Learners' spoken vocabulary use

Despite the importance of spoken vocabulary use to improve spoken skills, little has been conducted to describe spoken features of Korean learners. The purpose of this study is to investigate spoken vocabulary use of Korean learners and find out how far they deviate from native speaker norms. For this purpose, 40 Korean college students` spoken interaction data are transcribed and analysed. Using Wordsmith tool with 17,436 words, frequent single words category (modal items, delexical verbs, interactive words, and discourse markers) and frequent multi-words clusters (discourse markers, vagueness & approximation, politeness & face, and hedgeing) are compared with the spoken British National Corpus (BNC). Frequency analysis revealed that among 56 lexical items investigated, 34 items were underused and 17 items are not represented in KLC. It is evident that Korean learners used limited variety and range in those spoken vocabulary use. Based on this result, some suggestions are made to improve Korean learners` spoken vocabulary teaching and learning.

Effects of Predictability in L1 on the Use of L2 Verb-Noun Collocations

This paper examines the use of L2 verb-noun collocations by Korean learners of English focusing on predictability in L1. In order to investigate this, a test which consisted of a production and comprehension test was administered to 85 university students. The collocations used in the test were classified into 20 predictable and 20 unpredictable collocations according to the predictability in L1. The findings revealed that overall the Korean learners of English had insufficient collocational knowledge. Particularly, producing collocations seemed to be harder than comprehending collocations for the participants. A significant finding was that the participants made more errors in unpredictable collocations than in predictable collocations. In respect of the patterns of errors, a considerable number of errors appeared to be affected by their L1, while some of the errors were influenced by the overgeneralization of their prior learning such as overuse of delexical verbs. The study suggests that more attention should be paid to the effect of L1 in the use of L2 collocations and teaching collocation needs to be emphasized in the second language classroom in order to enhance learners’ communicative competence.

Comparing English vocabulary in a spoken learner corpus with a native speaker corpus: Pedagogical implications arising from an empirical study in Japan

Insights from corpus linguistics have come to be seen as having a significant impact in second language pedagogy. Learner corpora, or collections of texts spoken or written by non-native speakers (NNS) of a language, are now being used for the purposes of enhancing language teaching. Specifically, by comparing the corpus of NNS with native speakers (NS) it is possible to identify instances of learners' under- or over-use of spoken vocabulary, as well as to investigate how far, and in what ways learners deviate from NS's norms. This preliminary study compares a small NNS corpus of 43,651 words with an established NS corpus. Results revealed that the Japanese NNS differed markedly in many areas, especially in their underuse of certain lexical items such as discourse markers, modal items, adjectives for specific evaluations, some interactive words, delexical verbs and terms for marking vagueness and hedges. On the other hand, NNS overused some high frequency and auxiliary verbs and some common adjectives. From this data, we suggest that knowledge from learner corpora has important pedagogical implications which include giving higher priority to certain classes of vocabulary including multi-word clusters that appear to be underused among Japanese learners.

Delexical verbs and degrees of desemanticization

The semantics of the word “delexical” in the term “delexical verbs” suggests that the verb is functioning as little more than a lexically empty auxiliary, with most or all of the semantic content being carried by the deverbal noun. But to what extent is this the case? Following Gabriele Stein's vehement rejection of the idea that the delexical verbs give, have, take are “mere connectives” or “light” verbs, I am responding to her challenge (1991:15) to specify the extent to which the core meaning is “weakened” or “eroded”. Basing my findings on an exhaustive analysis of the delexical verbs give, have, make and take as they occur in a one million word corpus of academic writing, I isolate distinct meanings for each verb, and attempt to determine the degree to which these verbs are truly desemanticized. The following tendencies emerge: in support of Stein's assertion that each delexical verb brings its own unique meaning to the construction in which it occurs, I find that make and to a lesser extent give and have typically retain most of their full, intuitive meaning, whereas take is largely, and at times fully devoid of its intuitive meaning.