Search

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Corpus linguistic methods can now be easily employed in a wide range of studies within sub-disciplines of linguistics and well beyond. In a two-part paper, Gries (2022a, 2022b) challenges some of the most widely used 'association measures' of what many might feel to be powerful aspects of text patterning: collocation and key words. While the additional association measure offers some new possibilities, this paper highlights the strong influence of another frequency parameter on odds ratio and Gries's suggested association measure, and questions the applicability of his cautions for many different kinds of corpus research. Nevertheless, having been inspired to look at different aspects of association and dispersion more carefully, the author presents some new visualizations which were designed to communicate some of the important lessons to be learned from Gries's papers, especially for learners and teachers using corpus tools in Second Language classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MWE knowledge is key in the process of learning a foreign language, but its teaching remains hindered by the lack of list of expressions connected to pedagogical aims. In this paper, we present an extended version of the PolylexFLE database, containing 4,525 French multiword expressions (MWE) of three types: idioms, collocations or fixed expressions. In order to propose exercises following the difficulty scale of the European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), we used a mixed approach (manual and automatic) to annotate 1,186 expressions according to the CEFR levels. The paper focuses mostly on the automatic procedure that first identifies the expressions from the PolylexFLE database (and their variants) in a corpus of pedagogical texts (with CEFR labels) using a pattern-based system. In a second step, their distribution in this corpus is estimated and transformed into a single CEFR level. The automatic approach proposed is finally evaluated by 52 French as foreign language learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to identify what archaic words/word groups were still known and used both among language speakers and Turkish National Corpus (TNC) as an indication of lexical change in Turkish from 1900 to 2020. The present study explores the diachronic variation of lexical change in Turkish by combining the corpus-based variationist sociolinguistic approach with the perspective of historical sociolinguistics. The words/collocations thought to be outdated from the original version of "Eylül" novel, written in 1900, were selected and randomly subsampled using a computer-based randomization algorithm. A survey was formed using the outdated words/collocations along with the context. The results indicated that demographical variables did not affect word knowledge and that the archaic words were unfamiliar to all participants uniformly. The overall comparison of words/collocations tested in TNC and survey indicated similar results as the most and the least frequently used words were also the most and least abundantly present in TNC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at dialogicity in the Slow Art Day blog and focuses on the way the representation of participants encodes the complexity of the communicative action through a polyphony of textual voices. By focusing on posts from the pandemic years (2020 and 2021), and contrasting them with the previous period, we carry out a collocation analysis and a study of semantic preferences (Sinclair 2004) to explore how writers present themselves and how they interact with the reader and other textual voices in a context of cultural intermediation. By looking at forms of address and of self-mention, we trace how this blog enacts different forms of dialogic action with its readers and stakeholders in the extended situational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares use of collocations by Italian learners writing in and translating into English, conceptualising the two tasks as different modes of constrained language production and adopting Halverson's (2017) revised Gravitational Pull Hypothesis as a theoretical model. A particular focus is placed on identifying a method for comparing datasets containing translations and essays, assembled opportunistically and varying in size and structure. The study shows that lexical association scores for dependency-defined word pairs are significantly higher in translations than essays. A qualitative analysis of a subset of collocations shared and unique to either mode shows that the former set features more collocations with direct cross-linguistic links (connectivity), and that the source/first language seems to affect both modes similarly. We tentatively conclude that second/target language salience effects are more visible in translation than second language use, while connectivity and source language salience affect both modes of bilingual processing similarly, regardless of the mediation variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how translation trainees deal with verb-noun terminological collocations when translating a legal text into their L2. The learner data is juxtaposed with professional translations of the same text and comparable non-translated documents. The results indicate that a large proportion of learner renditions is attested in the reference corpora. There is also a relatively high convergence between learners' and experts' choices and symmetrical variability. Unattested and inadequate equivalents demonstrate a large variability and low frequency of individual items, which suggests a lack of systematic patterns in mistranslations. The inadequacy of learner solutions is mainly caused by the choice of a collocate and results in information transfer and naturalness errors, with the former being more idiosyncratic and the latter more recurrent. In conclusion, we argue for viewing L2 collocational competence through the lens of genre requirements and professional practice rather than dichotomous categories of nativelike and non-nativelike collocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the utility of metaphor as an investigative tool in "long-distance" corpora and discourse studies. I show that metaphor is both important for understanding discourses and useful for diachronic analysis because it allows us to abstract out above the purely lexical level, enabling comparison across contexts where the same concept could be lexicalised differently. The case-study is concerned with the oft-discussed metaphor of migrants are water in the UK-based Times newspaper from 1800–2018 and the conventionalisation and evaluative patterns are presented. The findings confirm that the water metaphor has an extensive discourse history regarding how migration is represented in the UK press, but also that evaluations may differ significantly. The paper shows how metaphor can provide a way to find discourse evaluations and framings across different time periods. The use of second-order collocates illustrates how corpus tools can help re-contextualise data to ensure interpretation heeds contemporary framings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper discusses how modal auxiliaries fit into a constructional view of language and how this view allows us to think in new ways about diachronic meaning change in modal auxiliaries. These issues will be illustrated on the basis of a diachronic corpus-based study of the modal auxiliary may, specifically focusing on changes in its collocational preferences during the past 200 years. The main point of this paper is the claim that a constructional view needs to take account of the mutual associations between modal auxiliaries and the lexical elements with which they occur. Changes in these mutual associations are usefully understood as change in a complex network of constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper aims to account for the multiple interpretations of the Chinese negative degree adverb bùshèn (不甚). In Xiandai Hanyu Dacidian Shangce (Modern Chinese Dictionary Volume I) (Ruan & Guo (eds) 2009), bùshèn is defined as 'the degree is not very high', which can be interpreted as 'not very'; however, in the CCL and BCC Modern Chinese corpora, a few cases showing that bùshèn can only be interpreted as indicating positive degree similar to 'very'. Using the extensive classical and modern Chinese data, we argue that the semantic change has undergone a process of analogy (cf. Harris & Campbell 1995; Fischer 2007; Traugott & Trousdale 2013). Specifically, the use of positive degree of bùshèn has been analogized to the extant positive degree adverb bùshèng (不胜). The semantic change is observed when bùshèn forms common collocations with an adjective or a verb which convey emotions, such as gǎnxiè 'grateful' in bùshèng gǎnxiè 'very grateful'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores meaning change, especially how listeners and readers handle polysemy, a topic which has come to the forefront of attention in recent years. It discusses in particular words for catastrophic events, which perhaps because of their dramatic content, seem to be prone to polysemy. The paper will look first at word class differences associated with the lexical item devastate, and will consider how their meanings differ. It will then evaluate the various meanings of the word disaster, looking particularly at clues which enable readers to distinguish the different senses. Finally, it looks at the newspaper language used to report an event which was widely labeled a disaster, the so-called 9/11 disaster, and considers journalists’ descriptions of the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word lists play a critical role in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teaching and learning, and recent developments include lists of academic collocations (e.g., vast majority, ultimate goal). There is however still a gap in evaluating lists focusing on a similar group of lexis. This paper evaluates two lists of academic collocations by Ackermann and Chen (2013) and Lei and Liu (2018) using three different methods: applying an evaluation framework adapted from Nation (2016), comparing the lexical constituents, and analysing the lexical coverage. The evaluation results give implications for EAP teachers to select the list that best suits their needs. By modelling the practice of evaluating word lists, this study highlights the importance of this work and encourages similar attempts in wordlist development studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about Professor of English Linguistics Martin Hilpert's research paper on the modal auxiliary 'may' and discuss collocations in the English language. Topics discussed include collocation of 'must', mutual information (MI) score and scoring combination, and modal verbs and construction grammar.

Follow-ups are elliptical interrogative forms typically constituting an utterance in their own right. They are used to signal attention to the interlocutor, to encourage them to continue or as a reply to a call. This paper investigates the invariant follow-up sì? ('yes?') in Italian and it argues that it represents a case of pragmatic language change. To this end, it investigates the diachronic distribution, collocation and contexts of usage of sì? in a variety of language sources in relation to plausible, equivalent expressions (i.e., dimmi and dica ['tell me']). The analysis will show that since its earliest record of use in films in 1960, the frequency of occurrence of this form has dramatically increased to the point that, today, it is the preferred device. The study will also provide solid evidence of positive correlations between the use of yes? in English language audio-visual products and the use of sì? in scripted and real-use Italian, strongly suggesting that the marker would in fact be a case of pragmatic borrowing from English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (John Benjamins Publishing Co.) is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates the usage of the Korean plain speech level suffix -ta in spoken discourse and discusses the relationship among its interactional functions, the local contexts of its use, and its basic meaning. This paper employs a usage-based approach, whereby naturally occurring spoken discourse is analyzed in detail by examining how the functions of -ta are distributed and to what extent the suffix is adapted to its context through the development of local patterns. The suffix -ta functions differently in terms of sentence types: on the one hand, it serves as a reactive token, an attention-getter, a self-repair, or a stance marker by indexing the speaker's cognitive process in spontaneous sentences. On the other hand, it can function as a way to claim speakership by indexing the on-going interactional process in non-spontaneous sentences. On the whole, compared with the intimate speech level suffix -e/a, the various functions of -ta are grounded in the representation of cognitive and interactional processing among conversation participants as the primitive form of their internalized knowledge. -Ta's frequent collocations with -keyss-, mac-, and ani- explain the highly adaptive feature of -ta to its local contexts. This paper reveals that the grammatical, lexical, and interactional contexts in using -ta contribute to the emergence of its interactional functions and its basic meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in Construction Grammar assumes no strict separation between syntax and the lexicon. However, recent work by Goldberg (1995, 2006) shows that there is indeed a separation between lexical entries and grammatical constructions, including constraints regulating the fusion of grammatical constructions with verbs. This paper argues that Goldberg’s characterization of the interactions between lexical entries and grammatical constructions faces some of the same difficulties as the interactions between lexical entries and transformational rules in the Chomskyan framework (Chomsky, 1965, 1981, 1995). Drawing on a variety of corpus data this paper presents specific proposals that should be considered in order to arrive at a solution that overcomes difficulties inherent to Goldberg’s approach. Based on a discussion of the concepts of analogy, collocational restrictions, frequency, and productivity this paper proposes to encode different types of semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic information in such a way that it is possible to account for a given utterance from a comprehension perspective, as well as a production perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that the general notion of an image metaphor, which has been traditionally confined to so-called “one-shot metaphors”, as used in literary and poetic language, could be expanded to describe many expressions that are found in everyday language. Following Caballero (2003a), I argue that the division in cognitive linguistics of metaphors into “image” and “conceptual” is over-simplistic. I show that many of the most frequent metaphors in my data have characteristics which would qualify them for inclusion in both categories. I also argue that connotational meaning is an important characteristic of these expressions, unifying their literal and non-literal meanings. A detailed analysis of the Bank of English corpus concordance for heel shows the numerical importance of such metaphors. I refer to research into metaphor that takes an emergentist perspective, and which has led a number of other existing distinctions to be questioned. I argue that these expressions, termed “metaphoremes”, which are difficult to classify using existing distinctions, should be regarded as prototypical on the grounds of their frequency, rather than as anomalous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language varieties should be taken into account in order to enhance fluency and naturalness of translated texts. In this paper we will examine the collocational verbal range for prima-facie translation equivalents of words like decision and dilemma, which in both languages denote the act or process of reaching a resolution after consideration, resolving a question or deciding something. We will be mainly concerned with diatopic variation in Spanish. To this end, we set out to develop a giga-token corpus-based protocol which includes a detailed and reproducible methodology sufficient to detect collocational peculiarities of transnational languages. To our knowledge, this is one of the first observational studies of this kind. The paper is organised as follows. Section 1 introduces some basic issues about the translation of collocations against the background of languages' anisomorphism. Section 2 provides a feature characterisation of collocations. Section 3 deals with the choice of corpora, corpus tools, nodes and patterns. Section 4 covers the automatic retrieval of the selected verb + noun (object) collocations in general Spanish and the co-existing national varieties. Special attention is paid to comparative results in terms of similarities and mismatches. Section 5 presents conclusions and outlines avenues of further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the use of technical collocations in the genre of popular science articles and the strategies used by translators to render such collocations. The study mainly aims to answer these questions: (1) are technical collocations used in this genre, and if yes, to what extent? (2) What are the strategies used to render such collocations into the target language? A pilot study is conducted to analyze a small parallel corpus of popular science articles from the National Geographic magazine and its Arabic version in order to identify technical collocations in the source texts and their equivalents in the target texts. Implications for future research in this area are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speakers do not always attribute agency straightforwardly when they communicate. While complying with the maxims of explicitness and relevance, they may depict states of affairs headed by an identifiable source. More often than not, however, it seems they leave out this source for a number of reasons and through different mechanisms. This paper is a corpus-based study of one such non-identifying structures, namely the extrapositional have-it-that construction, in examples such as Several hypotheses have it that land-use changes. Drawing on data from the BNC, this paper investigates the use, distribution and functioning of the have-it-that construction. The paper also highlights the usefulness of simple collexeme analysis in revealing systematic co-selection relationships within the construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the extension of conventional meanings of Chinese FACE expressions in their collocations as well as the collocations themselves through metonymy and metaphor. The data with five FACE expressions included are sampled from the corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics at Peking University. The conventional meaning of these five FACE expressions is 'the surface of the front of the head from the top of the forehead to the base of the chin and from ear to ear'. The conventional meaning of FACE in its collocations is metonymically extended to 'facial expression, emotion, attitude, person, health state, affection, sense of honor, etc.', and metaphorically to 'the front space or part of something, a part, a side or an aspect of something, the surface or the exposed layer of something, the geometric plane in math or scope/range of something, etc.'. When Chinese FACE is collocated with other words, its meanings are also extended through metonymy-metonymy chains, metonymy-metaphor continuums and metonymy-metaphor combinations. The meanings of Chinese FACE collocations (phrases) are mainly metonymically extended when used in certain contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although formulaic language has been studied extensively from both alinguistic and psycholinguistic perspective, little is known about the relationship between individual speakers' knowledge of collocations and their linguistic experience, or between collocational knowledge and other aspects of linguistic knowledge. This is partly because work in these areas has been hampered by lack of an adequate instrument measuring speakers' knowledge of collocations. This paper describes the development of such an instrument, the "Words that go together" (WGT) test, and some preliminary research using it. The instrument is a multiple choice test consisting of 40 items of varying frequency and collocation strength. The test was validated with a sample of 80 adult native speakers of English. Test-retest reliability was 0.80 and split-half reliability was 0.88. Convergent validity was established by comparing participants' scores with measures expected to correlate with language experience (print exposure, education, and age) and other linguistic abilities (vocabulary size, grammatical comprehension); divergent validity was established by comparing test scores with nonverbal IQ. The results of the validation study are then used to compare speakers' performance on the WGT with corpus-based measures of collocation strength (mutual information, z-score, t-score and simple frequency); however, no statistically reliable relationships were found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores ways in which research into collocation should be improved. After a discussion of the parameters underlying the notion of'collocation', the paper has three main parts. First, I argue that corpus linguistics would benefit from taking more seriously the understudied fact that collocations are not necessarily symmetric, as most association measures imply. Also, I introduce an association measure from the associative learning literature that can identify asymmetric collocations and show that it can also distinguish collocations with high and low association strengths well. Second, I summarize some advantages of this measure and brainstorm about ways in which it can help re-examine previous studies as well as support further applications. Finally, I adopt a broader perspective and discuss a variety of ways in which all association measures - directional or not - in corpus linguistics should be improved in order for us to obtain better and more reliable results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present paper is primarily methodological. It provides evidence that a research question investigated in a corpus can produce different results according to the software adopted, it queries the comparability of the results, and shows that the whole picture is always more than one piece of software can reveal. The field of research is a corpus of Letters to Shareholders referring to 2008, the year the current financial crisis began, compared to identically constructed corpora from the same companies, referring to 2006 and 2010. The paper argues that the macro analysis of key words and key semantic domains needs to be complemented by close phraseological analyses, since it is in the phraseology of the texts that the nuances of a message are to be found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a significant text genre in totalitarian societies: panegyrics of the leader. In countries under Stalinist rule, the output of panegyric texts reached immeasurable proportions. Probably due to their uniformity, few attempts have been made to analyse the single panegyric text. Attempting to identify the specific features of a given text, this paper analyses a set of particular features related to intra-textual semantic connexity, intertextuality and intentionality in a Czech sample from 1953. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how particular collocations and colligations are associated with discourse functions of unspecific anaphoric nouns. Unspecific anaphoric nouns such as problem, reason, idea and fault, called labels here, encapsulate and replace a preceding stretch of discourse. Such nouns used as a cohesive device also perform an evaluative function by recategorizing their specific meanings. Labels prefer particular syntactic environments according to the discourse function that is highlighted. Corpus-based research also reveals that unspecific nouns differ in their favoured syntactic pattern and in the favoured premodifiers used in each pattern. Differences between writing and speech in collocations and colligations associated with labels are also attributed to the different discourse functions they realize in each genre. paper argues that discourse dimensions should be brought into collocational and colligational descriptions of words that have discourse-managing functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on the groundwork and setting up of methods for an innovative approach to analysing text. We have proposed that there is a hitherto unexplored textual feature, which we call ‘repulsion’, which operates on the construction of meaning in an opposing way to that of word collocation. To illustrate, we do not say cheerfully happy even though we say blissfully happy. We focus on ‘lexical repulsion’, by which we mean the intuitively-observed tendency in conventional language use for certain pairs of words not to occur together, for no apparent reason other than convention. Our goal is to establish how repulsion as a whole operates and whether it can be assigned the status of an objectively measurable ‘force’. It is anticipated that this approach will have wide implications for corpus linguistics and NLP. In this paper, we take the particular case of repulsion between sense-related word pairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Signalling nouns are nouns which have cohesive properties across and within clauses. A signalling noun is potentially any abstract noun the full meaning of which can only be made specific by reference to its context. Examples of nouns which can function as signalling nouns are attitude, assistance, difficulty, endurance, process, reason, result etc. Signalling nouns in discourse are closely associated with nominalisation and are problematic for learners. Based on a corpus of argumentative essays written by Cantonese L1 learners of English, this paper presents a taxonomy of error types and frequency data of the different error types in the use of signalling nouns. The paper then compares the average number of signalling nouns used per essay with grades awarded to the essays, on the one hand, and the numbers of signalling noun errors according to grades, on the other. In both cases there is a significant correlation. The findings confirm the intuitive idea that the use of signalling nouns adds to the overall coherence of a text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of collocations plays an important role for the proficiency of ESL/EFL learners. Hence, educators and researchers have long tried to identify collocations typical of either academic or general English and the challenges involved in learning them. This paper proposes a comprehensive and type-balanced academic English collocation list (AECL). AECL is based on a large corpus of academic English and was created to cover the types of collocations that will be most useful to ESL/EFL learners. AECL is the result of an innovative research-based procedure that involves a five-step selection method. A comparison of the collocations on AECL with those found in well-known collocation dictionaries of general English and on three existing academic English collocation lists indicates that AECL indeed contains mainly academic rather than general English collocations. In addition, AECL is more comprehensive with regard to the types of collocations that are relevant to learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the relationship between grammar and language use by comparing word association and collocation. Since word association reveals mental semantic knowledge, usage-based approaches expect word association to mirror the relation between words in use, namely collocation. The paragraph is a more apt unit for collocation than the sentence in mirroring word association. Among measures of collocation, (simple) log likelihood and t-score turn out to be more consistent with association, with log likelihood leading by a small margin over MI or MI3. Overall, word association and collocation are quite close, but not perfectly close because of differences in relevant resources and the characteristics of lexical/semantic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper maps the lexico-grammatical resources of the representation of time in Macbeth, looking in particular at the way futurity is portrayed. The study is based on concordance analysis of the top full lexical items in frequency lists and of time-related keywords (generated using the other Shakespearian tragedies as a reference corpus). Paying particular attention to the occurrences in Macbeth and his wife’s speeches, the analysis centres on the collocations and semantic preferences of the items identified. The top full lexical items in the wordlist are shown to be related to the notion of time, especially contrasting the present and the future, hence contributing to the pace of the plot in the play. Keywords highlight the connection of the notion of time with the notion of fear and with the impossibility of predicting the future. In general, the analysis depicts a conceptual space in which time and futurity are not connected to hope but to fear, thus creating a menacing universe that has its origins in the protagonist himself, in the tension between deceitful prediction and frustrated volition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of swearing has increased in the last decade, diversifying to include a wider range of data and methods of analysis. Nevertheless, certain types of data and specifically large corpora of computer mediated communication (CMC) have not been studied extensively. In this paper, we fill a gap in research by studying the use of swearwords in blog data, and illustrate ways of identifying swearing in a large corpus by taking context into account. This approach, based on the examination of shared and unique collocates of known expletives, facilitates the distinction of attestations of swearing from non-swearing in the case of polysemous lexemes, and the analysis of overlaps in usage and meaning of swearwords. This work therefore goes beyond basic sentiment analysis and offers new insights into the use of collocation for refining profanity filters, providing innovative perspectives on issues of growing importance as online interaction becomes more widespread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tool GraphColl (Brezina et al. 2015) allows collocational networks to be identified within corpora, enabling corpus analysis to go beyond two-way collocation. This paper aims to illustrate the types of linguistic relationships that can appear when more than two words are considered, using graph theory to account for the different types of collocational "shapes" that can be formed within GraphColl networks. Using the reference corpus, the BE06, examples of different types of graphs were obtained and analysed in order to form an understanding of the sorts of relationships between words that occur in particular shapes. The analysis indicates that concepts from graph theory can be usefully integrated into corpus analysis of collocation as well as showing the potential for a more sophisticated understanding of the company that words keep. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores diachronic shifts in the literal and intensifying uses of dood 'dead' in the Dutch fake reflexive resultative construction. Without sufficient context, a clause like Hij werkte zich dood (lit. 'He worked himself dead') is ambiguous in that it is unclear whether dood expresses an actual result of the activity denoted by the verb or whether it intensifies that verbal activity. We will investigate shifts in the (relative) type and token frequencies of both subtypes over the last two centuries and show that the intensifying use has become predominant. Particular attention is paid to the notion of productivity, which may help us to elucidate the possible pathways along which dood - in its function as an intensifier - is moving. By taking into account the variety of verbs that dood has occurred with since the early 19th Century, we aim to assess whether the dramatic increase in relative frequency of intensifying dood is paralleled by a concomitant extension of its collocational range or, conversely, whether this increase in frequency is mainly due to the rise of some highly frequent collocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-cultural variation in the metaphors that are employed by healthcare researchers and professionals when discussing cancer care is a potential impediment to the sharing of expertise. By identifying patterns in the metaphorical language used in these contexts, we can reveal differences in how healthcare practitioners understand cancer and its treatments, thus enabling more effective intercultural communication in the field of oncology. To this end, the use of metaphor in collocations of the word 'treatment' in nursing journals published in British English, mainland Chinese, and Taiwanese Chinese is compared. Our analysis reveals differences regarding the agency given to the cancer, its treatment, and the patient; the interrelatedness of different bodily functions and organs; and the emphasis that is placed on the course of treatment as a whole as opposed to its individual stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on exhaustive diachronic corpus data, this paper determines the relative chronology in which the size nouns heap(s) and lot(s) have developed quantifier uses within NP of NP-syntagms, as in heaps / a lot of people. Using a constructional approach, it is claimed that size nouns occur in three distinct constructions or form–meaning pairings identified on the basis of systematic syntactic, semantico-pragmatic and collocational features. I argue that in order to establish which size noun was first to develop a quantifier use, we have to analyse diachronic data sets in terms of three constructions, viz. lexical head, partitive and quantifier constructions. In doing so, I will argue against the claim that heap developed its quantifier use first, around 1300, while lot developed one only around 1800. I will show that heap and lot(s) appear in an early partitive construction, c1300 and c1200, respectively, in which they are head nouns and have a collective sense. The quantifier construction in which heap(s) and lot(s) have modifier status and assess quantity similar to canonical quantifier many/much appears around the same time for both, viz. c1780. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While existing literature on cause frequently cites the negative meaning associated with that lexeme, i.e. the fact that cause tends to appear with a negative outcome, e.g. cause an accident, really no scholar has studied in any detail the historical development of the phenomenon. In order to address this missing line of scholarship concerning the diachronic development of, what we refer to here as, a semantic prosody, this paper presents a fine-grained historical study of the development of the negative semantic associations of cause by comparing tokens from the Early Modern English period to those from Present-day English. We are able to conclude that the semantic prosody involved with cause is an emergent diachronic phenomenon. In addition, we are also able to argue that it is at the level of construction that such a prosodic pattern operates. Following from the notion that the semantic prosody is a construction-level phenomenon, we offer an exemplar-based model to motivate certain of the diachronic and synchronic facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Similarities of the phraseology of institutionalized second language varieties and foreign learner varieties have gone almost completely unnoticed so far. In this paper, different types of co-selection phenomena are examined across ESL and EFL varieties on the basis of the ICE-corpora of Kenyan, Indian, Singaporean, and Jamaican English and of ICLE, the International Corpus of Learner English. Among the features investigated are the use of competing collocations such as play a role and play a part, the noun complementation of collocations (HAVE + INTENTION + of -ing vs. to + infinitive), and non-L1 (or “new”) prepositional verbs such as comprise of, demand for or emphasize on. The exploration shows that many co-selection phenomena do indeed recur not only across individual institutionalized L2 varieties but also across the two variety types. Certain kinds of language-internal irregularities in the phraseology of Standard English are shown to be a major reason for the observed parallels [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advances in computing technology which made possible the study of electronic text in large quantities opened the door to the study of lexis, and crucially of significant word collocation. The type and strength of preference or ‘attraction’ which obtains between two or more words has been the raw material out of which we have long been extracting secondary language resources by means of automated systems (e.g. A. Renouf, 1996; M. Pacey et al, 1998). Now, we turn to our vast data repositories once again, this time to try to find evidence for the existence of another ‘force’ in textual organisation, one which operates contrary to word ‘attraction’, and which we refer to as ‘repulsion’. Like attraction, repulsion is a universal phenomenon and we have an expectation that it will be discovered to be alive and well in language. By ‘repulsion’, we mean the rare or non co-occurrence of two words as neighbours. Since this is the case for the majority of words in the vocabulary, we begin with a focus on synonymous word pairs which, by virtue of their shared meanings, can be expected to provide more surprising, focussed and easily interpretable results. In this paper, we tentatively interpret from our results some of the ways in which repulsion seems to operate in text and to what extent it is proving to be amenable to objective measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluation — the function and usage of language to express the speaker’s or writer’s opinion — has only relatively recently become the object of systematic linguistic research, for example in stance or appraisal analysis. This paper proposes an alternative, corpus-based approach to evaluation which assumes that there are at least ten different meaning dimensions (parameters) along which speakers can evaluate aspects of the world. This framework helps to explain the complexity of evaluation, and in particular what is here called evaluative interplay or combination: the expression of more than two evaluative parameters at the same time, which can be realized by evaluative conflation (evaluations signalled by one and the same linguistic item) and evaluative collocation (evaluations signalled by different linguistic items). Both the parameter-based framework and evaluative interplay are illustrated with a number of examples from authentic discourse (mostly from British newspapers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on previous work on the properties of the adverbs 'basically', 'essentially' and 'fundamentally' and their formal equivalents in Spanish, extending the collocational part of this work to include three more Romance languages, Portuguese, French and Italian, the last two of which lack any systematic use of formal equivalents of 'basically'. Five internet-based corpora are used in the present study. Detailed collocational analysis confirms and extends the results of the previous studies, and demonstrates that there are some interesting parallels across languages, in that the set of adverbs under investigation associates with certain semantic concepts in several or all of the languages. There are, however, some important differences between English and the other languages, as well as more minor differences among the Romance languages. The study constitutes a further demonstration of the power and usefulness of corpus-based techniques in providing finely nuanced profiles of lexical items in different languages, which could be of benefit, for example, in advanced language teaching and translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to shed light on the diachronic evolution of collocations by examining structures formed in Modern Spanish with dar “give” plus state nouns (e.g. dar miedo “frighten”, literally, “give fear”). Using the Corpus del español, I offer a quantitative and qualitative analysis of eighteen representative dar miedo-type collocations from the 1200s to the 1900s. The results show that although the basic properties of dar miedo-type structures have remained remarkably stable over the centuries, during the Middle Ages the verb hacer “make” was used here almost as often as dar — a competition apparently inherited from Latin. While different nouns show different patterns of loss of hacer, echoing the lexical diffusion of certain grammatical changes, the 1500s saw a very sharp decline in “make” cases across the board, leading to its complete disappearance from this context by the 1800s. The loss of hacer led to a radical simplification of the collocational properties of state nouns in Spanish vis-à-vis Latin and other Modern Romance varieties. This process resulted both from language-internal factors mostly related to the lexical semantics of dar and hacer and from three key sociolinguistic processes in 16th-century Spanish: koineization, change of norm and increased standardization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective of this paper is to propose a corpus-based research methodology for comparing quantitative aspects of collocational patterning in translated and non-translated texts of the same language. The main issue under investigation is whether collocational patterns tend to be less diverse (i.e. reduced in range) in translated than non-translated texts. A pilot study is carried out with a view to examining the overall number of collocates and the distribution of collocations in relation to a given node in the translated and non-translated subcorpora. The data is drawn from a comparable corpus of Brazilian Portuguese which consists of two separate subcorpora: one made up of translated Brazilian Portuguese and the other consisting of non-translated Brazilian Portuguese. Both subcorpora are designed according to the same criteria and specifications and are of similar size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reassesses the description of collocation given by Sinclair in Chapter 8 of Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, in particular the implications of this description for models of language production and interpretation, contrasting the open choice and idiom principles. The concepts of independent and dependent meanings are explored, along with the relationship between texts and grammar. The arguments put forward in the Chapter are evaluated against collocation evidence obtained from a large reference corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an investigation of the extent and nature of cross-linguistic influence on both L2 and L1 phraseological competence of advanced Polish learners of English. We review relevant research studies, which describe various types of collocational deviation from native speaker norms in the language production of advanced learners, and indicate that the collocational choices of learners may be affected by their L1, which results either in incorrect collocations, or in patterns of underuse or overuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncovering the extent of word associations and how they are manifested has been an important area of study in corpus linguistics since the 1960s (Sinclair et al. 1970). This paper defines and describes a new way of categorising word association, the concgram, which constitutes all of the permutations of constituency and positional variation generated by the association of two or more words. Concgrams are identified without prior input from the user (other than to set the size of the span) employing a fully automated search that reveals all of the word association patterns that exist in a corpus. This study argues that concgrams represent more fully word associations in a corpus. Most concgrams seem to be non-contiguous, and show both constituency (AB, ACB) and positional (AB, BA) variations. Further studies of concgrams will help in the task of uncovering the full extent of the idiom principle (Sinclair 1987). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses some approaches to the categorisation of cohesive devices with reference to spoken academic discourse, multi-word units, and strings of frequently co-occurring words (lexical bundles). It goes on to investigate the cohesive role of lexical bundles in a corpus of 160 university lectures (120 from the BASE corpus and 40 from MICASE). Like the bundles from the T2K SWAL teaching subcorpus, investigated by Biber, Conrad and Cortes (2004), the bundles in the lecture corpus included both ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ elements. The majority of frequently occurring bundles were found to be used to signal discourse relations, although their cohesive function was not necessarily obvious when listed out of context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]