Stretched verb collocations with give: their useand translation into Spanish using the BNCand CREA corpora

Within the context of on-going research,1 this paper explores the pedagogical implications ofcontrastive analyses of multiword units in English and Spanish based on electronic corpora asa CALL resource. The main tenets of collocations from a contrastive perspective – and thepoints of contact and departure between both languages – are discussed prior to examining thecommonest types of verb1noun combinations as a significant case of so-called ‘de-lexicalized’,‘light’, ‘empty’, ‘thin’, ‘stretched’ or ‘support verbs’. A qualitatively and quantitatively-oriented case study is accordingly conducted, determining the weight of dar in supportverb constructions within the Corpus de Referencia del Espan˜ol Actual (CREA) and of theEnglish equivalent stretched verb constructions with give within the British National Corpus(BNC). Based on the empirical data obtained in this way, this paper provides relevant insightsfor more accurate translations, helping to enhance the collocational competence of L2 students,who tend to avoid constructions including empty verbs like give in favour of full-verbforms. The detailed findings in this paper come to shed light on the potential of CALLresources for improving the collocational usage of foreign-language learners, as quantitativeand qualitative comparisons of collocations based on electronic corpora serve to highlight thesimilarities and, more importantly, the lexical and typological differences between both languages,thereby substantiating the invaluable role that corpus analysis may play for languageteaching in general and for collocational knowledge and proficiency in particular.