A Corpus-Based Approach to the Study of Collocation

Collocation plays a central role in efficient language acquisition and proficient language production. This paper reviews its typical definitions and classifications which include lexical collocations and grammatical collocations. By adopting corpus-based approach, the author makes a contrastive study on three commonly used near-synonym verbs "demand", "request" and "require" in CLEC and several native language corpora in frequency, register and collocates. The results indicate there exist overused or underused phenomena and collocational errors compared with the native English speakers. This draws some implications that foreign language teachers should take collocational knowledge into account in English language teaching and raise L2 learners' collocational awareness and competence.