Publications

Publication details [#61247]

Wang, Ying. 2016. The Idiom Principle and L1 Influence. A contrastive learner-corpus study of delexical verb + noun collocations. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 77). John Benjamins. xii, 249 pp.
Publication type
Book – monograph
Publication language
English
Language as a subject

Annotation

This book examines delexical verb + noun collocations such as make a decision, give rise to and take care of in Swedish and Chinese learner English. Using a methodological framework that combines learner corpus research with a contrastive perspective, the study is one of the few in the field to incorporate corpora of the learner’s L1 to investigate the effects of L1 influence. The book provides a highly detailed and multi-faceted analysis of delexical verb + noun collocations in terms of frequency of occurrence, lexical preferences and morphosyntactic patterns. Quantitative and qualitative results on overuse, underuse and errors are presented with linguistically and pedagogically relevant interpretations that include cultural and discourse aspects. More importantly, the book throws light on how L2 learners may alternate between the open-choice principle and the idiom principle as well as the extent and nature of L1 influence on their collocational use.