Adjective-noun collocation problems: a corpus based study

Abstract

It is undeniable that with the development of computer technology, linguistic corpora have developed very rapidly. Due to the use of real language, providing databases of naturally occurring spoken and written discourse, corpora have been applied to various levels of language study. Concerning the lexicon, collocations have received a lot of attention in corpus-based research, which led to substantive improvement in reliability as to choice of collocations for teaching materials. Adjective-noun collocations are explicitly taught in the Headway Advanced textbook. My teaching experience with such textbook led me to question whether the criterion used for presenting them had been either the frequency of occurrence in real language or the authors' intuition. This paper describes a corpus-based study, using the full version of 'Collins CobuildDirect' from the University of Birmingham, in which the frequency of occurrence of the adjective-noun collocations presented in the course book mentioned are investigated. The findings reveal that intuition, rather than empirical evidence, was the criterion used. Assuming that frequency should be given priority in learning and teaching because they are generally required, adjective-noun collocations, which have a more significant frequency of occurrence on the basis of the Cobuild Directdatabase, are suggested.