L1 Influence on Learners’ Renderings of English Collocations: A Polish/German Empirical Study

Abstract

According to Benson, Benson and Ilson, the compilers of the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English (1986:ix), ‘In English as in any other language there are many fixed, identifiable, non-idiomatic phrases and constructions. Such groups of words are called recurrent combinations, fixed combinations or collocations.’ These authors give the example of murder and its collocates. On hearing the noun we immediately recall from memory the verb to commit and the phrase to commit a murder . It is only later that other verbs like to investigate, to describe or to witness appear. To commit a murder is a far more fixed collocation than those with the other three verbs. Relative fixedness is a characteristic of collocations. Another characteristic is their non-idiomaticity. Although idioms are another category of fixed sequences, their meaning is often non-combinatory, i.e. it cannot be decoded from the meanings of their constituents; on the contrary, the meaning of collocations is always transparent. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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