Adjective preposition collocations are a common feature of the English language. Learn common adjective and preposition combinations with ESL printable worksheets and example sentences in English.
adverb adjective collocations pdf 12
An example of a phraseological collocation is the expression strong tea.[1] While the same meaning could be conveyed by the roughly equivalent powerful tea, this adjective does not modify tea frequently enough for English speakers to become accustomed to its co-occurrence and regard it as idiomatic or unmarked. (By way of counterexample, powerful is idiomatically preferred to strong when modifying a computer or a car.)
There are about six main types of collocations: adjective + noun, noun + noun (such as collective nouns), verb + noun, adverb + adjective, verbs + prepositional phrase (phrasal verbs), and verb + adverb.
The processing of collocations involves a number of parameters, the most important of which is the measure of association, which evaluates whether the co-occurrence is purely by chance or statistically significant. Due to the non-random nature of language, most collocations are classed as significant, and the association scores are simply used to rank the results. Commonly used measures of association include mutual information, t scores, and log-likelihood.[2][3]
In 1933, Harold Palmer's Second Interim Report on English Collocations highlighted the importance of collocation as a key to producing natural-sounding language, for anyone learning a foreign language.[12] Thus from the 1940s onwards, information about recurrent word combinations became a standard feature of monolingual learner's dictionaries. As these dictionaries became "less word-centred and more phrase-centred",[13] more attention was paid to collocation. This trend was supported, from the beginning of the 21st century, by the availability of large text corpora and intelligent corpus-querying software, making it possible to provide a more systematic account of collocation in dictionaries. Using these tools, dictionaries such as the Macmillan English Dictionary and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English included boxes or panels with lists of frequent collocations.[14]
There are also a number of specialized dictionaries devoted to describing the frequent collocations in a language.[15] These include (for Spanish) Redes: Diccionario combinatorio del español contemporaneo (2004), (for French) Le Robert: Dictionnaire des combinaisons de mots (2007), and (for English) the LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations (1997) and the Macmillan Collocations Dictionary (2010).[16]
Adjectives are words that modify and describe nouns. An adjective is a type of word that complements the noun and provides more information about it, either by specifying general qualities, detailing particular characteristics that are inherent to it, or by delimiting its scope.
In the following table, you can see the different methods to form adjectives from nouns, including the suffixes, the inherent meaning of the suffix, the nouns and their transformation into adjectives.
Remember that adjectives ending in -ed are used when the subject feels some way, whereas -ing adjectives are used when the subject produces the feeling. For more info about these adjectives visit this previous post, where this point is explained in more depth.
A combination of two words in which the occurrence of one word is conditional on the presence of the other (for example an Adverb-Adjective collocation is a combination of an adverb and an adjective with the adjective conditioned by the adverb).
1. Are there any statistically significant differences in the use of Adverb-Adjective collocations between AEFLLs and NBES?2. Are there any statistically significant differences in the use of Adverb-Adjective collocation by AEFLLs that could be attributed to L1 interference?
From my point of view, shared with many other scholars, collocation is a key element within a language that requires a complex level of language proficiency (Shammas, 2013; Siyanova and Schmitt, 2008). Most of the studies of EFLLs have shown that using collocations poses a difficulty for language learning production, as these central elements of a language require a knowledge of L2 grammar, i.e. correctly placing vocabulary in a sentence (Al-Zahrani, 1998; Alangari, 2019; Laufer and Waldman, 2011). Also, their correct use is indicative of a level of language proficiency being that of a near-native speaker; the more learners produce correct collocations, the more proficient they appear to be in that language (Siyanova and Schmitt, 2008). The use of lexical collocation has received a lot of research attention as it is viewed as troublesome not only for language learners but also for translators (Mahmoud, Abdulmoneim., 2005; Nesselhauf, 2003).
The Adverb can be placed in the initial, medial (in sentences containing verbs), and final position, creating four possible positions within Arabic sentence structure, which explains the source of difficulty for AEFLLs using adverbs. Al Aqad has pointed out that there is a particular difficulty in placing adverbs in English due to the flexibility of their positions in Arabic, in which they can occur before or after adjectives or verbs, which presents several possibilities for potential errors caused by L1 interference (2013).
Data analysisIn this study, I have tried to investigate the frequency differences between the use by AEFLLs and by NBES of Adverb-Adjective collocations. The second aim of this study was to investigate the influence of Arabic as an L1 on the use of Adverb-Adjective collocations by AEFLLs. Therefore, two methods of analysis have been adopted to answer the two research questions; frequency-based analysis and error analysis. Frequency-based analysis identifies the commonly used Adverb-Adjective collocations based on their occurrence. This first approach will provide the baseline data for the comparison. The second approach will use the collocation output from the first research question to investigate L1 interference following the error analysis analytical framework.
1. Group 1: contains collocations that occurred between 1-5 times in the BNC;2. Group 2: contains collocations that occurred 6-20 times in the BNC;3. Group 3: contains collocations that occurred 21-100 times in the BNC;4. Group 4: contains collocations that occurred >100 times in the BNC.
RESULTSIn the first research question I aim to identify any statistically significant differences between AEFLLs and NBES in the use of Adverb-Adjective collocation. I compared the number of collocations extracted from both corpora, which suggests the first significant difference; there were 211 and 1253 instances in total for the AEFLLs and British students respectively (see Table 4). The total numbers suggest that the AEFLLs use fewer Adverb-Adjective collocations than the NBES do. This is also clear in the number of collocations list for the AEFLLs where 193 collocations out of the 211, accounting for 91.14%, only have a single occurrence.
The eta-squared formula is η 2[H]= (H-k+1)/(n-k), where H is the obtained value of the Kruskal-Wallis test in SPSS, k is the size of the corpora and n is the total number of collocations for both the AEFLLs corpora, BAWE corpus and BNC (Tomczak and Tomczak, 2014).In addition to the Kruskal-Wallis H test, the multiple comparisons indicate that there is no significant difference between the BNC and BAWE in terms of the use of the 20-collocation set. However, the comparison suggests that there is a significant difference between the AEFLLs corpus and both native English corpora, rejecting the null hypothesis at p-value >0.000.
The extraction phase reveals a difference between the two corpora in terms of the number of Adverb-Adjective collocations. The collocation output in IntelliText revealed only 63 and 101 collocations for the AEFLLs corpora and the BAWE corpus respectively. Therefore, I have implemented another extraction method to extract more data for the comparative study by considering the top 100 adverbs in the BNC; these adverbs also occur in the top 100 adverb list in the BAWE corpus. Besides, the data in this study leads to the rejection of the method that investigates instances with a 20 ipmw cut-off frequency as there were only nine collocations with this frequency range in the AEFLLs corpus; most of the collocations listed fall under the 0-5 ipmw cut-off frequency, which accounts for 91.14% of the AEFLLs corpus and 97.76% of the BAWE corpus (see Table 4). According to this result, setting the cut-off frequency to 20 ipmw seems to be an inappropriate approach to implement when investigating the differences between the two data sets. Therefore, I proceeded to investigate the collocations that occurred within the range of 6-150 ipmw, creating a list of 20 collocations (see Table 6.).
The first set of questions aimed to investigate whether there are statistically significant differences between AEFLLs and NBES in terms of the use of Adverb-Adjective lexical collocations. The results suggest that the Adverb-Adjective collocation is not frequently used by AEFLLs. It seems that this collocation set is challenging to EFLLs, which is apparent in the small number of the total instances in the AEFLLs corpus (Demir, 2017). This is in agreement with other scholars who found that EFLLs found that Adverb-Adjective collocations were the most challenging collocation to produce, both for Japanese and French EFLLs (Kurosaki, 2012), and for Arab EFLLs (Farooqui, 2016; Mahmoud, Abdulmoneim., 2005). The single most striking observation to emerge from the data comparison is that the frequency results for the 20 collocations were significantly higher for the AEFLLs corpus than the NBES corpus. This observation contradicts the findings of Demir (2017) who found a statistically significant difference in the opposite direction between native English students and Turkish EFLLs in terms of the use of Adverb-Adjective collocations. 2ff7e9595c
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