Help with English!

[Gwendalino]

I‘m marking some English tests and a few students have made the same mistake- Australia has a big wildlife, the wildlife of Australia is big etc.

I know this is wrong, wildlife cannot be big. But there can be a big variety of wildlife. I can’t explain why this is! Can anyone help?

Collocation.
There's nothing intrinsically "wrong" grammatically or lexically. It's just not what we'd usually use.
You'd usually say "large variety" rather than "big". You'd not use "big" on its own to describe a multiple yet abstract noun like wildlife.

Thanks. I hate answering ‘because it sounds wrong‘. Your answer sounds more knowledgeable! 😂

Because 'big' describes a singular thing? That's all I can think of. A variety, an elephant, a tiger, can all be described as big but not wildlife, which is made up of distinctly different things? I can't find a definitive answer but you couldn't say 'a wildlife' but could say 'a koala bear'? So far trying it out in my head anything that can be preceded by 'a' or 'an' can be described as big?

Or maybe anything you can count can be described as big? You can have three big cats but not three big wildlifes.

Is it not because wildlife is an uncountable noun? (Like weather, water, happiness etc) and so is 'sizeless'. You can have a lot of it or a little of it, you can have a large or small amount of it but you can't have a big or small one of it.

Yes, this . (I mean, you can certainly use ‘big’ with some uncountable nouns idiomatically — coming in from a storm, saying ‘BIG weather out there!’, but it’s not ‘correct’.)

Yes, agreed. It's not about 'big', it's about 'a'. You don't have 'a wildlife', you have 'some wildlife'.

You don't have 'a butter', you have 'some butter'; you can have 'a block of butter'. Likewise, you can have 'a range of wildlife', or 'a big range of wildlife', or 'a variety of wildlife'.

That makes sense! Thank you all so much