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Comparing learners’ and native speakers’ use of collocations in written Spanish

  • Marcos García Salido EMAIL logo and Marcos Garcia

Abstract

This article compares the use of collocations in texts written by native speakers and advanced learners of Spanish. The collocations studied were first identified in the sample texts on the grounds of phraseological criteria and subsequently assigned frequency information corresponding to their occurrence in a reference corpus of Spanish. The distribution of collocations with different frequency of co-occurrence and mutual information scores in the texts of the two samples was then compared, as was their proportion in the collocation repertoire of native speakers and learners. The study revealed significant differences both in terms of frequency and mutual information.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by two post-doctoral grants from the Xunta de Galicia (POS-A/2013/191) and the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitivity (Juan de la Cierva formación FJCI-2014-22853).

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Published Online: 2017-05-13
Published in Print: 2018-11-27

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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