Vocabulary is the foundation of learning language. Nevertheless, it's the 1980's that the importance of vocabulary was on the rise. On the other side, as the internet has come into wide use since the end of the 20th century, we are living in a global ...
Vocabulary is the foundation of learning language. Nevertheless, it's the 1980's that the importance of vocabulary was on the rise. On the other side, as the internet has come into wide use since the end of the 20th century, we are living in a global village. This surroundings made the demand of increased authentic English ability. And at the same time, collocation is being on the rise as an effective way to improve English competence as well as learn vocabulary.
Collocation was first introduced by Firth in 1957 and has been researched by many linguists, but it does not get attention until it's the end of the 20th century. Since then, the study of collocation has been on the increased greatly.
This study is originated with the fact that the goal of CSAT is contributing to normalizing the school education by setting questions based on the fundamental notions to reflect substance and level which is suitable in the high school course. This is about the collocations included in SAET(Scholastic Ability English Test) to check whether reflecting substance and level of the high school course, whether setting questions to a usefully evaluative degree, and whether contributing to normalizing the school education especially in the vocabularied aspects as well. The source of this study is all SAET papers taken for an examination from 1994 to 2007 except all listening comprehensive tests. I examine which types vocabulary collocates with transitive verbs such as make, get, and take according to the sorts of collocation. In addition, I try to examine practical use and frequency of collocation according to yearly and educational course and according to two types which are standard and inflectional forms.
The total number of examples is 341. The basic forms of make, get, and take are included 93 times, 76 times and 57 times respectively. The total number including the inflectional forms of them is 156, 99 and 86 times respectively. In the case of make, get, and take, the most frequent type is 'Verb + Noun/Pronoun', which appears 72 times, 32 times, and 48 times respectively. Especially make is combined with 'Verb + Noun/Pronoun' 72 times, which shows the best frequency. Make and get collocate with various vocabulary every year, while take didn't collocate in 2005 and there may be the limit to collocate. The frequency of sort is separate that make verbs are included 8 parts, get ones are 12 parts and take ones are 7 parts, which means get verbs collocate variously in many sorts. The point that I must get attention to is that the frequency between make and get is complementary distribution. Here are two kinds of complementary distribution. First, only make verb can be included in 'transitive verb + object + a bare infinitive' sort, while only get verb can be included in 'transitive verb + object + to infinitive' sort. So when the causative function must be used grammatically, one of them is selected. Secondly two verbs can be included in 'transitive verb + object + a particle/adjective' sort, so both of them is chosen. That is, when get shows high frequency in some parts, make shows low one in the same parts. That is why two verbs have the grammatically same character and roles. However, two verbs have distinct lexical characters. That is, make and get collocate with different nouns in general, and they can be distinguished from each other although they collocate with the same words.
Make and get have the same grammatical function such as 'transitive verb + object + a bare infinitive', 'transitive verb + object + to infinitive', 'transitive verb + object + a particle/adjective', which means that collocation doesn't have to be taught in the lexical class. That is, collocation can be used in the grammatical class. In case of applying it to the grammatical one, teachers must consider that the difficulty depends on the length of objectives and design teaching methods. In addition, collocation is on the rise sharply to the listening comprehensive course as well as to the reading comprehensive one because collocation has the character which is very useful authentically. Therefore, teaching methods which are combined with listening and vocabulary or listening and grammar need designing.