Colligational Patterns in China English: The Case of the Verbs of Communication

Abstract

This present study aims to investigate the colligational structures in China English. A corpus-based and comparative methodology was adopted in which three verbs of communication (discuss, communicate and negotiate) were chosen as the research objects. The Corpus of China English (CCE) was built with 13.9 million tokens. All the colligational patterns of the three verbs were extracted from the CCE by the tool Colligator, and analyzed in comparison with those from the British National Corpus (BNC). The major findings of the study are: (1) China English and British English share some common core colligational patterns, for example, the V deter. pattern for the verb discuss, the V prep. and V adv. patterns for the verb communicate, and the V prep. and V deter. patterns for the verb negotiate are the most frequently used patterns of all the colligations in both corpora. (2) The number of occurrences of some colligational patterns in CCE is significantly greater than that in BNC. They are V pl. n., V conj. and V prop. n. for the verb discuss, V prep. for the verb communicate, and V infin. to for the verb negotiate. (3) Some colligational patterns occur less frequently in CCE than those in BNC, such as the patterns V deter., V pers. pron. and V poss. pron for the verb discuss, V sing. n. and V deter. for the verb communicate, and V adj. for the verb negotiate. (4) No new colligational patterns have been found in China English. The study extends research on World Englishes, and its findings can attest to the process of structural nativisation of the English language used in the contexts of China.