This study is motivated by the desire to help Chinese students write natural-sounding
English in a foreign language environment. One of the challenges of learning English
for Chinese learners is native-like production, which even the most advanced learners
rarely achieve. With the development of the Computer Learner Corpus (CLC), it has
become more convenient and easy to detect these non-native-like features through
comparing native-speakers’ (NSs) and non-native speakers’ (NNSs) corpora. Even
though CLC studies indeed facilitate the investigation of non-nativeness, the results
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This is partly because of the traditional perspective of teaching and learning English.
In the past, teachers often only corrected grammatical errors for students, leading the
English teaching approach to focus on grammar. Previous work on describing the
deviances of learner language in CLC research has also mainly concentrated on
comparing frequencies of uses (i.e. overuses and underuses) in the learner language and
target language corpora, or stating errors through error-tagged corpora (Diaz-Negrillo
& Fernandez-Dominguez, 2006:84). However, these methodologies cover only part of
the language repertoire of learners, i.e. frequency and errors. James (1998:65-70)
explains that errors can be identified for breach of either ‘grammaticality’ or
‘acceptability’ (or both). The former indicates grammatical, semantic and phonological
well-formedness and the latter refers to contextual appropriacy (for example, “She
decided to answer the telephone call” is unacceptable when the speaker intends to
‘pick up the receiver while it is ringing’, see James (1998:68)). As the intention of the
speaker/writer is usually not clear, errors in corpus study are mainly limited to the
former type. Therefore we need a broader view in describing and explaining learner
language as a unique system, which should not be envisaged as only confined to
negative aspects but should be described in a comprehensive view. In order to help
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are shown but there are detectable differences which display the features of
non-nativeness.
To compensate for the weakness of traditional error analysis, some researchers in
learner corpus studies have advocated a new way of research. In her much-quoted study,
Granger (1998a:13) proposes Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA), which states
the importance of comparing the languages of NSs and NNSs. Granger also reminds us
that the purpose of a learner corpus is to “uncover the features of non-nativeness of
learner language”, with an emphasis that the features should not only be focused on
“plain errors”, but should also cover the “frequency of use of certain words, phrases or
structures”. Leech (1998:xvii) also points out that learner corpus research enables us to
explore not only what the learners did wrong but also what they did right. This is true
and essential for describing learner languages, and we can gain a great deal of
information from those expressions which do not contain errors. Even if a learner does
not make any errors, their wording may still seem to be different from native writing, as
observed by Shei (2005) (c.f. Section 1.2.2). The general impression of learner
language is conceived as less expressive in contrast to products from native writers.
This cannot be fully accounted for by simply judging whether the learners can write
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An all-inclusive perspective can be underpinned by the theories which arise from the
studies of co-occurrences in language. Such research has attested to the existence of
‘phraseology/idiomaticity’ in language, such as idioms, collocation, phraseological
units, semantic association, sense-structure patterns, textual fixedness, etc. (Hoey, 2005;
Howarth, 1998; Hunston & Francis, 1999; Moon, 1998; Nesselhauf, 2003; Shei, 2005;
Sinclair, 1991, among many others). These studies have shed light on how language
can be described holistically. The increasing numbers of such studies suggest that the
importance of phraseology is mounting. Therefore, co-occurrences at several linguistic
levels, such as lexical or grammatical associations, etc., which are termed ‘extended
lexical units’ by Sinclair (2004b), will be the major concerns of this research. The term
‘phraseology’ will be adopted in a wide sense to account for all of these relevant issues.
That a large number of language constructions are fixed, prefabricated or idiomatic
raises the question as to whether learner language also has similar phenomena. Sinclair
(1991:110) proposes the ‘idiom principle’, which states that language users have many
‘semi-preconstructed phrases’ on hand, and other studies which have looked at
phraseologies have also substantiated that LL is phraseological to a certain extent as
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language in combining or sequencing lexical items, this area can fruitfully contribute to
our understanding of learner language.
This thesis will focus on phrasal verbs, which are used as an example by Sinclair
(2004a:26) that casts doubt on the assumption that ‘words are independent in a
language’. Many other studies of formulaic languages also concentrate on PVs (see
Chapter 2), demonstrating that PVs are the fertile field par excellence to explore
phraseologies. The second reason lies in the difficulties PVs present to learners in
English learning. PVs are always a hot issue raised in a foreign language setting, and
are often treated independently in textbooks, because their behaviours are so particular
and complicated. They have been regarded as a thorny problem for the linguistic
complexities they carry.
Earlier, we have seen that PVs have complicated features such as being polysemous,
idiomatic, etc., which often cause stumbling blocks for learners. The reason that PVs
are worthy of meticulous attention can be addressed by their difficulty to learners.
Difficulties with PVs may stem from structure divergence across languages. It is
reasonable to assume that Chinese English learners will have problems acquiring this
particular language structure. In fact, PVs have been demonstrated to result in problems
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As this research studies the language of Chinese learners, their first language (Chinese)
is bound to interfere with their second language performance. PVs appear to cause
serious problems, especially to Chinese learners, because PVs in Chinese and English
have largely dissimilar properties. Although Chinese has PVs, they are different from
those in English in that the particles are inseparable from the verbs, and there are fewer
particles; moreover, PVs in Chinese rarely have figurative meanings (Liao & Fukuya,
2004:211). All of these mentioned above have contributed to the difficulties of learning
PVs, posing the need to investigate this acute problem. Given these impetus, the focus
of this study will thus be placed on phrasal verbs.
The discovery that the meaning of a linguistic item has consonance with its
associated phraseologies has drawn many researchers’ interest to the contextual
characteristics; thereby the research direction will be steered towards discovering these
phraseological associations. Many types of linguistic item, such as verbs with nouns,
adverbs, and some discourse features, have been investigated in terms of their
phraseologies. These studies have made substantial contributions to our knowledge
about language. Unfortunately such an attempt has not yet been applied to PVs, which
are a significant area at the core of idiomaticity/phraseology studies, and a great
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verb and its particle or problems in respect of PVs’ syntactic complexity and semantic
opaqueness (see Chapter 2). Their concerns are limited to the PVs themselves without
considering co-occurring factors. Outside factors (semantic association/ prosody/
sequence), although they have been proved vital, have not been attended to in the area
of PVs. Little attention has been paid to their actual usages, which are defined by the
PV itself and its context. To take a wider view of the behaviours of PVs, this thesis
advances the scope to explore more phraseological elements which distinguish the
Chinese learner language and the native English language.
In pedagogy, researchers adopting a cognitive approach have often suggested that
the best way to learn PVs is to grasp the uniformed patterns of the particles, and
generalise from the fundamental sense when encountering new PVs (see Section 3.4.3).
The pedagogical focus has been concentrated on the entangled syntactic and semantic
features of PVs. These research tendencies are admittedly helpful in embodying
knowledge in respect of PVs. However, these pedagogical approaches have some
limitations. For instance, the cognitive approach can save learners’ efforts as they only
need to learn the basic meanings of the particles, but they will still fall short of
employing a particular PV at their disposal because the cognitive analysis of the
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Teaching learners the complexities of PVs will result in the learners becoming very
confused. One solution may be to pay attention to the usages of PVs in context, but such
a study unfortunately has not been conducted so far.
The most vital gap in our exploration of LL has been pointed out by Cowie and
Howarth (1996:88): “little is known in detail about phraseological competence in a
second language, nor about how it is acquired”. A few decades have passed, but
progress in this field is still advancing rather slowly. Not all phraseological units are
given the same consideration. Researchers of LL tend to be interested in studying
certain phraseological phenomena such as prefabricated sequences/formulae (e.g. De
Cock, Granger, Leech, & McEnery, 1998; Granger, 1998b) and collocations (Handl,
2008; Howarth, 1996; Lennon, 2005; Nesselhauf, 2005). Other phraseological
phenomena such as semantic preference and semantic prosody, even though their
importance has been well established in native English (e.g. Kennedy, 2008; Louw,
1993; Partington, 2004), have not drawn as much attention in the domain of learner
language studies. Taken together, a study which considers comprehensive factors
(phraseological behaviours) in relation to one specific linguistic group is missing in the
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