Semantic Preference of Verb-Noun Collocation: Corpus-based analysis

DOI

10.2991/conaplin-18.2019.216How to use a DOI?

Keywords

argumentative essay; corpus linguistics; language learners; semantic preference; verb-noun collocation

Abstract

Todays semantic preference and semantic prosody are two notions that many scholars have been carefully studied in the field of corpus linguistics as corpora have become larger in size, and tools for extracting different lexical items for different purposes have been developed. The focus of this study was semantic preference, the relation between a word form and set of semantically-related words. This research specifically studied semantic preference of words increase and improve that seem to be problematic for language learners. Hence, the present study aimed to describe students’ usage of verb-noun collocation by analyzing their argumentative essays. This, therefore, triggers the researcher to further compare it by semantically exploring how the native speakers’ collocation usage of increase and improve. In the scope of corpus, the online British Academic Written English (BAWE), the research used sequential explanatory design that primary focus is to explain the phenomenon. The result of the study was that the English language learners mostly made errors in using the collocations of increase and improve. In addition, BAWE pointed out increase mainly collocates with quantity, such as rate, number, level, cost, value, amount and price whereas improve with quality. The errors are caused by the transfer of first language, Indonesian, to second language, English. To establish evidence, researcher used the Indonesian Web Corpus (IndonesianWaC).

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Christiana Sidupa
AU  - Afdol Tharik Wastono
PY  - 2019/06
DA  - 2019/06
TI  - Semantic Preference of Verb-Noun Collocation: Corpus-based analysis
BT  - Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Applied Linguistics (CONAPLIN 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 7
EP  - 11
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/conaplin-18.2019.216
DO  - 10.2991/conaplin-18.2019.216
ID  - Sidupa2019/06
ER  -