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General
We analyze the use of the verb "take", especially the noun-collocations of "take". We have calculated the frequency of 2-gram, which consist of verb “take” and a subsequent word, from BNC and JEFLL corpus, then compared the results. By looking at the top 20 word-collocations of "take”, obvious distinctions have been discovered. It proved again that in native language “the fixed expressions” occupy a large portion of written language use (Yoshitomi 2006).
In JEFFL corpus, the number of formulaic sequences occurs considerably less in learner writing than in comparable native speaker writing.
Ex. (1)Take pictures, take breakfast, take money, take bread, take water, take glasses…etc(JEFLL)
(2)Take place, take part, take advantage, take account...etc(BNC)
One possible reason for the large amount of occurrences of concrete nouns after word “take” is probably due to the overuse of “noun + concrete” collocations. This kind of collocations is considered to be safe option, since it has been practiced and repeated frequently in the process of SLA.
In the BNC corpus, the syntactic structures of the sentences used by native speakers of English, in which lexical collocations are observed, are relatively complicated compared to that of learners’ data.
Ex (1) You may remember that we were talking last autumn about gas prices hopefully continuing to rise natural
gas by to rise during the rest of the year and in fact that did take place and it did have some impact on
the domestic rig count in the United States which went up quite strongly in the last part of the year. (BNC)
(2) Our school festival take place in September. (JEFLL)
http://f42.aaa.livedoor.jp/~imawaka/imgboardphp/futaba.htm
Yoshitomi, A. (2006). The Use of Phrasal Verbsby Japanese Learners of English.
