Verbs in the Written English of Chinese Learners: A Corpus-based Comparison between Non-native Speakers and Native Speakers by Xiaotian Guo A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR of PHILOSOPHY Supervisor: Professor Susan Hunston The Department of English The School of Humanities The University of Birmingham October 2006 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract This thesis consists of ten chapters and its research methodology is a combination of quantitative and qualitative. Chapter One introduces the theme of the thesis, a demonstration of a corpus-based comparative approach in detecting the needs of the learners by looking for the similarities and disparities between the learner English (the COLEC corpus) and the NS English (the LOCNESS corpus). Chapter Two reviews the literature in relevant learner language studies and indicates the tasks of the research. The data and technology are introduced in Chapter Three. Chapter Four shows how two verb lemma lists can be made by using the Wordsmith Tools supported by other corpus and IT tools. How to make sense of the verb lemma lists is the focus of the second part of this chapter. Chapter Five deals with the individual forms of verbs and the findings suggest that there is less homogeneity in the learner English than the NS English. Chapter Six extends the research to verb–noun relationships in the learner English and the NS English and the result shows that the learners prioritise verbs over nouns. Chapter Seven studies the learners’ preferences in using the patterns of KEEP compared with those of the NSs, and finds that the learners have various problems in using this simple verb. In this chapter, too, my reservations about the traditional use of ‘overuse’ and ‘underuse’ are expressed and a finer classification system is suggested. Chapter Eight compares another frequently-occurring verb, TAKE, in the aspect of collocates and yields similar findings that the learners have problems even with such simple vocabulary. In Chapter Nine, the research findings from Chapter Four to Chapter Eight are revisited and discussed in relation to the theme of the thesis. The concluding chapter, Chapter Ten, summarises the previous chapters and envisages how learner language studies will develop in the coming few years. i Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Susan Hunston. She spent a large amount of time on my thesis and guided me from the design of the research to the last version of each chapter. As an experienced supervisor and teacher, she knows very well when to leave me free exploring for something useful and when to bring my attention back to things with value. She hardly tells me what to do, but offers suggestions, comments, and clues for further development, leaving me enough time to reflect and digest. Undoubtedly, the knowledge I obtained from her supervision will be the most valuable assets for my academic career. Secondly, my thanks should go to my beloved wife, Xiaorong (Wang). Actually, she sacrificed so much for my PhD study that I can hardly find appropriate words to express my gratitude. Different from many students who were funded by one means or another, my PhD was self- sponsored. Therefore, my finance became the dominating difficulty of my PhD study. In order to overcome this obstacle, she worked extremely hard and underwent great hardship and suffering. Even though she deserves a long break after the submission of my thesis, the unfortunate damage caused to her health may take the rest of her life to mend. In this sense, any words of thanks are incredibly weak and inadequate. Thirdly, my sincere thanks go to my colleagues and friends who have supported me in many different aspects. Without their help my thesis could not have been accomplished by now. The names to follow are only some of them (with all the given names first and surnames last to be consistent): Richard (Zhonghua) Xiao, Scott (Songlin) Piao, Wenzhong Li, Pernilla Danielsson, Seo-In Shin, and Frank (Maocheng) Liang for their help in IT and corpus technologies; Geoff Barnbrook, Antoinette Renouf, Wenzhong Li and Jinbang Du for their valuable comments and suggestions; Sylviane Granger, John Milton, Angela Hasselgren, Shichun Gui, Jianzhong Pu, and Michael Rundell for their articles, PhD theses or other information sent to me when I was in desperate need of them; Wenjin Zhao, Zequan Liu, Laiqi Zhang, Junhua Zhang and Yaodong Wang for their encouragement and support as friends. There are others who helped me in one way or anther, but I am afraid I cannot list them all here. ii Fourthly, I am grateful to my external examiner Mike Scott and internal examiner Martin Hewings for their valuable comments and advice and the chair to my viva Murray Knowles for his valuable time. In addition, I am deeply indebted to my sister who looked after my parents together with my brother while I could not fulfil my part of duty as a son. I also thank my wife’s family, Shulin and his family for their encouragement and support. My special thanks go to my daughter who accompanied me through the ups and downs of the years, especially when my wife had to work in another place. She also helped me with the proofreading of the Chinese pin-yin (the remaining errors still belong to me, of course). Furthermore, thanks are overdue to the Great Britain-China Education Trust and Sino-British Fellowship Trust for the £1000 fellowship which was sent to me on the very day of the Chinese Spring Festival of 2003. It was the only funding I gained throughout my PhD study. Even though such an amount was far from liberating me from the financial strains, the very act of providing such a grant justified my study and greatly encouraged me to go through the rest of the difficulties. It meant a lot to me. Last but not least, I must thank the University of Birmingham, especially the staff members of the Department of English, the School of Humanities, the Information Service, the Academic Office and the International Office for their unfailing and patient support. iii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................1 1.1 T HE THEME AND AIM OF THE RESEARCH .............................................................................1 1.2 I NTRODUCING COMPUTER LEARNER CORPUS RESEARCH ....................................................1 1.3 T HE BACKGROUND TO THIS RESEARCH ..............................................................................2 1.4 T HE IMPETUS OF THIS RESEARCH .......................................................................................3 1.5 T HE FOCUS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS OF THE RESEARCH ................................................4 1.6 T HE METHODOLOGY OF THE RESEARCH .............................................................................4 1.7 T WO ASSUMPTIONS BEHIND THIS RESEARCH ......................................................................5 1.8 T HE STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS .........................................................................................6 CHAPTER TWO......................................................................................................................8 A LITERATURE REVIEW OF LEARNER LANGUAGE STUDIES................................8 2.1 E ARLIER LEARNER LANGUAGE STUDIES .............................................................................8 2.1.1 Error analysis recalled ..............................................................................................8 2.1.2 Second language acquisition reviewed.................................................................... 11 2.1.3 Conclusion............................................................................................................... 11 2.2 C OMPUTER LEARNER CORPORA : A NEW ERA ....................................................................12 2.2.1 The International Corpus of Learner English .........................................................13 2.2.2 The Longman Learners’ Corpus..............................................................................13 2.2.3 The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Learner Corpus................14 2.2.4 The Chinese Learner English Corpus .....................................................................14 2.2.5 Computer learner English studies as a ‘newborn baby’ of applied linguistics.......15 2.3 T YPOLOGY OF CLC DATA ................................................................................................16 2.3.1 Synchronic vs. diachronic........................................................................................16 2.3.2 Written vs. spoken....................................................................................................17 2.3.3 Un-annotated vs. annotated.....................................................................................18 2.4 C LEAN