An Analysis of the Collocation of 'Get' : Toward a Better Communication

Abstract

This study, first of all, examines how frequently the basic word 'get' is used in an authentic English text. Sesame Street is chosen because this program is one of the most popular TV programs for American children and almost all the American children learn some English through this program in their early years of life. This study analyzes the collocations of got in this program using the classification system proposed by Tabuchi (1990) and compares them with those of the Japanese junior high school English textbooks which are one of materials the Japanese students first encounter in their English-as-a-foreign-language learning experience. There are tremendous differences between the two kinds of text in the collocations of 'get.' The collocations using 'get' in the textbooks can cover only about 48 percent of all the collocations used in Sesame Street. In addition it also compares those two types of collocations with those of the corpus made from the English compositions the Japanese junior and senior high school students wrote. As we can imagine, the students used only the patterns they have learned in the textbook and their corpus showed an extreme inclination to Use the "get + adv pattern" (47.2%). Based on those findings, we discuss its implications for language acquisition and language learning in the final section for our bettor communication with native speakers of English at a deeper level.