A Contrastive Study of “Adjective-Noun” Collocation between Chinese and English

Abstract

Collocation is one of the most important contents in linguistics and practical linguistics. The ability of collocation is one of the most prominent abilities that can reflect the discourse competence of native speakers and language learners. From Firth first put collocation forward in 1957 till now, in the area of language teaching and other related areas, theory workers and teaching practitioners define and discuss the methods of learning collocation and other problems from different angles. Also, they revealed the significance and some important features of collocation in language learning. Along with being one of the main methods in language learning, the importance of researching collocation based on corpus in vocabulary learning are appearing gradually. According to the corpus of CCL( Center For Chinese Linguistics PKU), the Chines-English Bilingual Corpuses of the Four Major Classical Novels, this thesis mainly investigates the differences of adjective-noun collocation between the Chinese adjective “大(Da)” and its English counterparts “big/ large”. According to comparing the three words in theses sentences appear in these corpus, this thesis reveals that the differences between big and large when translating Chinese adjective “大(Da)” and help students to know that how to use the two words correctly.