Phraseology: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Collocations between English Adjectives and the Noun Deal

Abstract: Using appropriate phraseological units and collocations is a prerequisite to proficient language use. Studies have shown that language learners do face challenges with collocations at both written and spoken levels since the majority of the learners rely heavily on language rules rather than context appropriateness when forming language chunks (Foster, 2001). This suggests that learners would often use words separately without taking note of the context of use. This project examined the phraseology and collocational patterns of adjective-noun combinations, specifically the noun “deal” and its collocations with “big”, “good”, and “great”. The analysis was based on the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC). The choice of this corpus was because it is one of the largest monolingual British English corpora. Targeted collocations were retrieved by browsing through the concordance software in the BNC using a simple query language. The findings demonstrate that native speakers’ knowledge of English collocations develops in parallel with their understanding of vocabulary, unlike non-native speakers, which may be in part because collocations are not taught.