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Stretched verb collocations with give: their use and translation into Spanish using the BNC and CREA corpora

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2010

Silvia Molina-Plaza  and
Eduardo de Gregorio-Godeo
Silvia Molina-Plaza*
Affiliation:
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Navales, Arco de la Victoria s/n, 28040 Madrid, Spain (email: Silvia.Molina@upm.es)
Eduardo de Gregorio-Godeo*
Affiliation:
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Departamento de Filología Moderna, Facultad de Letras, Avda. Camilo José Cela s/n 13071 Ciudad Real, Spain (email: Eduardo.Gregorio@uclm.es)
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Abstract

Within the context of on-going research,1 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 Español 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.

Keywords

Collocationsstretched verbstranslationphraseologyCALL
Type
Regular papers
Information
ReCALL , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , May 2010 , pp. 191 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning 2010

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