According to Boers and Lindstromberg, (2012) even at advanced level, L2 learners who are generally competent at using formulaic language may make errors from time to time. This is because, collocation, which is a subset of formulaic language represents an ambiguous area of language. Due to this ambiguity, Boers and Lindstromberg (2012) highlight that the rules and boundaries for the formation of collocations may not always be easily accessible to L2 learners. At length, in relation to collocational uses among native speakers, both scholars express that it is difficult to articulate exactly the reason for the selection of certain sequences. Therefore, deciding upon the “right” collocations to teach to L2 learners and to provide rationale for it can be exceedingly challenging.
Essentially, in this study, central attention is given to verb-noun collocations. Firstly, to reiterate the postulation by Hill (2000), 70% of language made in utterances, written texts or speech are fixed expressions. More specifically, Howarth (1998) and Nesselhauf (2005) claim that a large part of these utterances are verb-noun collocations because they contain the core of the information and the intended ideas of language expressions. Besides that, both elements involved in the formation of verb-noun collocations equally convey the overall meaning of the expressions (Granger, 1998). This means that the verbs or the nouns cannot be substituted lightly, as it may cause deviation in meaning. However, with delexical verbs, the semantic load of the overall meaning is carried by the noun they co-occur with, which has been found to be notoriously challenging for L2 learners especially when L2 learners are not familiar with the accurate and idiomatic form of the collocations (Yamashita & Jiang, 2010).
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As per the above discussion, Boers, Demecheeler, Coxhead and Webb (2014) explain that most verb-noun collocations are made up of delexical or “light verbs”. Therefore, problem arises when L2 learners do not allocate adequate attention to the verb form and wrongly assume that any synonymous verbs may express similar meaning when paired up with the nouns (e.g.: “do an arrangement” in exchange for “make an arrangement”).
Due to the “loose” nature of the verb, errors in verb-noun collocations are more prominent than its counterparts such as adverb-adjective or adjective-noun collocations. This is mainly due to the verb’s attachment to inflections such as number, tense, aspect and person (Laufer & Waldman, 2011). For this reason, L2 learners cannot always rely only upon the dictionary form of verb-noun collocations. In the example by Laufer (2011), the verb-noun collocation “to take measures” may appear in variations such as “they took strong measures against”, and “measures are being taken to reduce”. In both variations, the verb in the collocation is used in the past tense form and with additional element as in the adjective “strong” in “strong measure”. Therefore, the L2 learners need to process the derivations which are possible for a single collocation and in doing so, they need to be aware of the restrictions bound to that particular collocation. It is essentially the lack of the knowledge of this restriction which causes the errors in collocational use.
Besides that, the L2 learners’ native language (L1) has been documented as having an impact on their learning of L2 collocations. In the corpus study by Hong, Rahim, Hua and Salehuddin (2014) among Malay speakers of English, it was found that the felicitous use of verb-noun collocations was prominently caused by a negative inter-lingual transfer. The learners’ reliance upon their L1 which is Malay language, illustrates that the learners assumed that there is a word-by-word correspondence between their L1 and L2. For instance, in the learner’s writing of “story about the tragedy”, it is evident that the learner has resorted to a word-by-word translation from the presumed Malay phrase
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“menceritakan tentang tragedi itu” in which the verb “story” is assumed to be an equivalent of “menceritakan” (DBP Sah Bahasa, 2018).
In addition, a study among Thai learners’ use of verb-preposition collocations by Sumonsriworakun and Pongpairoj (2017) also documented a case of negative L1 transfer which is also related to incongruence between English and Thai formation of collocations. For example, the English combinations “die of” and “die from” are not common to the Thai language. Therefore, Thai L2 learners are prone to using felicitous form of the prepositions “by” and “with” as in “die by” and “die with”. Likewise, Poocharoenshil (2012) remarks that among Thai EFL speakers, it is likely that the use of the preposition “for” is avoided as in “I will wait for her” as the Thai language does not consist of the preposition. Hence, it is more likely that Thai learners would resort to an alternative utterance which would then be erroneous.
Moreover, another possible reason for L2 learners’ erroneous production of collocations is the transparency of the meaning of the collocations. Laufer and Waldman (2011) and Peters (2012) claim that certain collocations with transparency in meaning are unlikely to cause problem in comprehension. Conversely, it would pose problem in the production process. As exemplified by Laufer and Girsai (2008), L2 learners assumed that the apparent meaning of the collocation “carry the burden” allowed for substitution to be made, as in “carry the problem”. In addition to this, an earlier study by Nesselhauf (2005) documented that the German-speaking English learners were deceived by similar transparency in meaning of the collocation “do homework” which is compared against the German formation “make homework” or “Hausaufgaben machen”. Laufer (2011) suggests that L2 learners are susceptible to making such errors because they have fallen into the trap of “deceptive compatibility”. This means that L2 learners are unaware that
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collocations are combined based on certain combinatorial restrictions and that there are formal differences between the L1 and L2 collocations.
Finally, another factor for collocational errors among L2 learners is approximation. L2 learners may resort to using word which they assume to have semantic likeness with the target items (Hong, Rahim, Hua and Salehuddin, 2014). Approximation was examined to be the second most prominent source of errors in collocations especially pertaining to the noun element. In this sense, the L2 learners resorted to approximation in order to reduce the linguistic load when the correct structure is not apparent to them (Boers, Demecheleer, Coxhead & Webb, 2014). For example, the learners in the study by Hong, Rahim, Hua and Salehuddin (2014, p. 40) approximated the word ‘cutting” as in “cutting some flowers” as having a close proximity to the target structure “picking some flowers”.
In conclusion, language instructors need to determine the ways to overcome the factors of errors as discussed above. This is imperative in order to help the L2 learners overcome the final hurdle of collocational difficulty so that they may possess similar depth of understanding of formulaic sequences as native speakers.