1 Lexical infelicity in causative constructions. Comparing native and learner collostructions

This paper seeks to describe foreign learners ’ use of English periphrastic causative constructions, by comparing data from the International Corpus of Learner English with similar data from the British National Corpus. While the frequency of the constructions and the syntactic errors found in the learner corpus are briefly discussed, the focus of the study is on collostructions, the combination of particular constructions with certain verbs in the non-finite verb slot. After showing that the non-finite verb slot displays strong lexical preferences in native English, the technique of distinctive collexeme analysis is used to compare native speakers ’ and learners ’ lexical choices and quantify the degree of overlap between the two groups. The analysis reveals that learners ’ causative constructions are often unidiomatic in that they contain verbs which are unlikely to occur in native English with that particular construction. Three possible explanations are provided to account for these lexical infelicities, namely lack of register awareness, transfer from the mother tongue and inadequacy of teaching materials. The article concludes by emphasising the necessity to explicitly teach phraseological aspects of language