Italian EFL learners’ collocational errors and English collocations dictionaries: a case study

The paper discusses selected erroneous and questionable verb+noun, noun+verb and adjective+noun combinations taken from the Italian component of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE-IT) (Granger et al., 2002; Granger et al., 2009; Prat Zagrebelsky, 2004), and analyses the treatment of the words they are composed of in The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English (3rd edn., 2009) (BBI), The Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English (2nd edn., 2009) (OCD), and the Macmillan Collocations Dictionary for learners of English (2010) (MCD). To assess their acceptability, learners’ productions are compared with data from the English corpus WordBanks Online and with what is recorded in the BBI, the OCD, and the MCD. The aim is to assess the assistance of these dictionaries in helping learners avoid collocational errors. Given the small number of the combinations analysed, findings cannot be generalised: however, they show that use restrictions are often not signalled in the three dictionaries and that the base-collocate relation should be revised, especially in the case of verb+noun and noun+verb combinations, so as to include both subject and object nouns in verb entries