Extract

Abstract: It is generally agreed in the recent literature that collocation plays an important role in language learning. The term collocation can be expanded to include the relationship between function words and verbs. This paper researched the top 20 verbs that occur before four conditional markers in Japanese: to, ba, tara, and nara. Three of these markers—to, ba, and tara—show similar results. Interestingly, the verbs can be divided into five groups according to meaning: (1) verbs of perception or information processing, such as “see” and “compare”; (2) verbs of saying and thinking, such as “say” or “think”; (3) verbs of time or change, such as “become” or “begin”; (4) verbs of movement, such as “go to” or “go in”; and (5) verbs of existence, such as “be” or “have.” This new categorization is helpful for learners to imagine using markers in daily life.

Keywords: Collocation, Verb, Conditional Marker, Subcategory, Corpus-Driven Approach

1. Introduction

What is the state of “being able to use an expression” for language learners? Simply knowing the meaning or understanding the grammatical rules of an expression is not sufficient. Woodland (2000:31) claims that “learning more vocabulary is not just learning new words, it is often learning familiar words in new combinations.” Such combinations are known as collocations.

The word collocation brings to mind verb-noun combinations, such as have a break or adjective-noun combinations, such as a sound sleep. However, the term collocation can be...