Publication details
Grammatical collocations in English essays written by Czech secondary school students
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | This paper presents the results of a study investigating the frequency and accuracy of five types of grammatical collocations (G8E to G8I) according to the BBI Dictionary classification of collocations (Benson et al., 1986) in a Czech learner corpus. CZEMATELC 2017 (44,044 tokens; 2,765 types) is an English language learner corpus consisting of 390 essays from the written part of the national school-leaving examination which leads to a certificate of secondary education in the Czech Republic. The findings reveals that grammatical collocations G8E (verb + to-inf) (n=247) and G8F (verb + inf without 'to') (n=722) are fairly frequent with a high incidence of accurate uses. The errors which can be loosely attributed to overgeneralization (e.g. verbs followed by past tense forms) appear to be outnumbered by errors potentially caused by mother-tongue influence (incorrect complementation by an infinitive without "to"). Grammatical collocations G8G (verb + v-ing) (n=37), G8H (verb + obj + to-inf) (n=9) and G8I (verb + obj + inf without 'to') (n=28) are rather scarce, but mostly used accurately. The results indicate that the learners attempt to produce more complex verb patterns with higher accuracy in well-rehearsed phrases and with some verbs which form colligation patterns which are more easily perceived as similar to those in Czech. |
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