The cross-sectional development of verb–noun collocations as constructions in L2 writing

Abstract Previous studies utilizing association measures for collocation analysis have demonstrated significant differences in second language (L2) collocation production across proficiency levels. However, the association strength measures utilized in these previous studies have neglected part of speech and grammatical information when calculating association strength between collocating words. The current study seeks to address these limitations by defining verb–noun collocations as constructions within the framework of Construction Grammar and analyzing their cross-sectional development in L2 writing. Texts from a corpus of L2 writing evenly divided into low, medium, and high proficiency levels were analyzed for verb–noun collocation frequency, diversity, and association strength using covarying collexeme analysis. Results showed that more proficient writers produced a more diverse range of verb–noun collocations that were less frequent and more positively and strongly associated. These results have clear implications for Usage-based Second Language Acquisition research, L2 collocation development research, and L2 writing pedagogy.