University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Use of Verb-Noun Collocations by Advanced Learners of Chinese Xiaolin Peng University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Education Commons, Linguistics Commons, and the Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons Recommended Citation Peng, Xiaolin, "Use of Verb-Noun Collocations by Advanced Learners of Chinese" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1940. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1940 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1940 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Use of Verb-Noun Collocations by Advanced Learners of Chinese Abstract The important role of collocations has been widely accepted in the current literature, but to date there are still relatively few studies on language learners’ collocation knowledge and development within different local contexts. The current study intends to contribute to the literature by investigating the oral production of Chinese verb-noun (V-N) collocations by a group of highly proficient learners comprised of both Chinese as a foreign language learners (CFL learners) and Chinese heritage language learners (CHL learners), as compared to Chinese native speakers (CNSs). The study brings together current literature on collocation and heritage language learners both from a Western perspective and from the Chinese linguistic and sociolinguistic perspective. Samples of spoken language data discussing both academic and non-academic topics were collected through one-on-one interviews with 10 CFL learners, 10 CHL learners and 10 CNSs. The data are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively to yield the following three findings: (1) There is a significant difference in using Chinese verb-noun (V-N) collocations among CFL learners, CHL learners, and CNSs.