This paper describes a corpus-based contrastive study of collocation in English and Chinese. In light of the corpus-based approach to identify functionally equivalent units, the present paper attempts to identify the collocational translation equivalents of zunshou by using a parallel corpus and two comparable corpora. This study shows that more often than not, we can find in English more than one translation equivalents. By taking collocates into consideration, we are able to establish bilingual equivalence with more accuracy. The present study indicates that semantic preference and semantic prosody play a vital role in establishing equivalence between corresponding lexical sequences in English and Chinese. The studies of collocation across languages have potentially useful implications for foreign language teaching and learning, contrastive linguistic and translation studies, as well as bilingual lexicography.
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