Abstract:
Using appropriate phraseological units and
collocations is a prerequisite to proficient language use. Studies have shown
that language learners do face challenges with collocations at both written and
spoken levels since the majority of the learners rely heavily on language rules
rather than context appropriateness when forming language chunks (Foster,
2001). This suggests that learners would often use words separately without
taking note of the context of use. This project examined the phraseology and collocational
patterns of adjective-noun combinations, specifically the noun “deal” and its
collocations with “big”, “good”, and “great”. The analysis was based on the
100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC). The choice of this corpus was
because it is one of the largest monolingual British English corpora. Targeted collocations were retrieved by browsing through the
concordance software in the BNC using a simple query language. The
findings demonstrate that native speakers’ knowledge of English
collocations develops in parallel with their understanding of vocabulary,
unlike non-native speakers, which may be in part because collocations are not
taught.
“You
shall know a word by the company it keeps”. J.R. Firth (British linguist,
1890-1960)
Keywords:
British National Corpus (BNC), Collocations, Language Learners, Phraseology
DOI: www.doi.org/10.36349/tjllc.2025.v04i01.016
author/Jalaludeen Ibrahim, Ph.D.
journal/Tasambo JLLC 4(1) | May 2025 |
