ABSTRACT

Through the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the collocations in MLC in Chapters 4 and 5, it was found that, for the lexical patterns examined in the present study, Chinese university students use more lexical collocations in their writing; for the grammatical patterns examined in the present study, there are fewer grammatical collocations in their writing. For both lexical and grammatical collocations, their use lacks variety. Chinese university students coin some collocations which may be from analogy with their mother tongue or formed on the basis of English grammatical rules, and such collocations are often unacceptable in standard English. In addition, collocations in MLC have their own characteristics. Some are used in a distinctively different way from those of native speakers; some have strong Chinese cultural connotations and others have stylistic features. The following sections will detail the reasons why these distinctive characteristics of collocations in MLC are produced. Five categories will be discussed on the basis of the quantitative and qualitative analyses in previous chapters. They are:

1 Repetition – the repeated use of the same expression; 2 Avoidance – the tendency to use an alternative to an idiomatic expression or to

paraphrase idiomatic expressions due to ignorance of them; 3 Transfer – the interference of mother tongue on learners’ language production; 4 Target language influence – some errors in learner English seem to have their

cause in certain features of the target language itself; and 5 Cross-cultural difference – the influence of different cultural backgrounds on

learners’ language production.