ERIC Number: EJ892812
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010-May
Pages: 21
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0958-3440
EISSN: N/A
Stretched Verb Collocations with "Give": Their Use and Translation into Spanish Using the BNC and CREA Corpora
Molina-Plaza, Silvia; de Gregorio-Godeo, Eduardo
ReCALL, v22 n2 p191-211 May 2010
Within the context of on-going research, this paper explores the pedagogical implications of contrastive analyses of multiword units in English and Spanish based on electronic corpora as a CALL resource. The main tenets of collocations from a contrastive perspective--and the points of contact and departure between both languages--are discussed prior to examining the commonest types of verb + noun combinations as a significant case of so-called "de-lexicalized", "light", "empty", "thin", "stretched" or "support verbs". A qualitatively and quantitatively-oriented case study is accordingly conducted, determining the weight of "dar" in support verb constructions within the "Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual" (CREA) and of the English equivalent stretched verb constructions with "give" within the British National Corpus (BNC). Based on the empirical data obtained in this way, this paper provides relevant insights for more accurate translations, helping to enhance the collocational competence of L2 students, who tend to avoid constructions including empty verbs like "give" in favour of full-verb forms. The detailed findings in this paper come to shed light on the potential of CALL resources for improving the collocational usage of foreign-language learners, as quantitative and qualitative comparisons of collocations based on electronic corpora serve to highlight the similarities and, more importantly, the lexical and typological differences between both languages, thereby substantiating the invaluable role that corpus analysis may play for language teaching in general and for collocational knowledge and proficiency in particular.
Descriptors: Verbs, English (Second Language), Spanish, Case Studies, Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, Translation, Educational Technology, Computer Software, Computer Uses in Education, Contrastive Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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