The Use of Noun-Verb Collocations by Chinese Advanced Learners of Japanese

The Differences with Japanese Native Speakers and the Influence of Chinese

Abstract

The present study investigates the use of Japanese noun-verb collocations by Chinese advanced learners of Japanese (advanced CJL), focusing on the differences with Japanese native speakers (JNS) and the influence of Chinese mother tongue. The influence of mother tongue is not only investigated by Chinese native speakers’ intuitive judgments, but also verified by the data of Korean learners of Japanese (KJL). Data obtained from “YNU written language corpus” were analyzed and the comparison between advanced CJL and JNS revealed that: 1) there is a significant difference in the number of tokens, but not in the number of types; 2) the advanced CJL are found to over-use high-frequency collocations and under-use strongly associated ones; 3) in the 30 most frequently used collocations, nearly half of them are used by both advanced CJL and JNS, but advanced CJL are inclined to use less restricted collocates. Moreover, 25% of errors (30 items) in collocations by advanced CJL are attributed to Chinese influence by Chinese native speakers, but 3 of these items are also found in KJL, suggesting that the judgments of mother tongue influence cannot be definitively made solely by the intuition of the mother tongue native speakers.