The Idiom Principle and L1 Influence

This book examines delexical verb + noun collocations such as make a decision, give rise to and take care of in Swedish and Chinese learner English. Using a methodological framework that combines learner corpus research with a contrastive perspective, the study is one of the very few in the field to incorporate corpora of the learner’s L1 to investigate the effects of L1 influence. The book provides a highly detailed and multi-faceted analysis of delexical verb + noun collocations in terms of frequency of occurrence, lexical preferences and morphosyntactic patterns. Quantitative and qualitative results on overuse, underuse and errors are presented with linguistically and pedagogically relevant interpretations that include cultural and discourse aspects. More importantly, the book throws light on how L2 learners may alternate between the open-choice principle and the idiom principle as well as the extent and nature of L1 influence on their collocational use.

Luciana Forti, Università per Stranieri di Perugia, on Linguist List 28. 3575 (2017):
This an excellent contribution to the intersecting fields of Learner Corpus Research and Second Language Acquisition. The results of the analysis are clearly described and systematically discussed in light of the most relevant and recent theories. This clarity and systematicity makes the reading of the book particularly enjoyable. The absence of a lengthy theoretical introduction is also a definite plus: the choice of using the theory to discuss the actual results based on the data-analysis, instead of meticulously setting the scene before seeing any of the data, is certainly to be appreciated.