This book describes an approach to lexis and grammar based on the concept of phraseology and of language patterning arising from work on large corpora. The notion of 'pattern' as a systematic way of dealing with the interface between lexis and grammar was used in Collins Cobuild English Dictionary (1995) and in the two books in the Collins Cobuild Grammar Patterns series (1996; 1998). This volume describes the research that led to these publications, and explores the theoretical and practical implications of the research. The first chapter sets the work in the context of work on phraseology. The next two chapters give several examples of patterns and how they are identified. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss and exemplify the association of pattern and meaning. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 relate the concept of pattern to traditional approaches to grammar and to discourse. Chapter 9 summarizes the book and adds to the theoretical discussion, as well as indicating the applications of this approach to language teaching. The volume is intended to contribute to the current debate concerning how corpora challenge existing linguistic theories, and as such will be of interest to researchers in the fields of grammar, lexis, discourse and corpus linguistics. It is written in an accessible style, however, and will be equally suitable for students taking courses in those areas.

The 8th edition of the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's Dictionary offers up-to-date coverage of today's English in a clear, attractive format. This dictionary is ideal for upper-intermediate and advanced learners of English. It covers all the words, phrases, and idioms that students need to master in order to speak and write effective English. With full-sentence definitions written in simple, natural English, this dictionary is easy to use and understand. The examples, taken from the 4.5-billion-word Collins Corpus, show learners how the words are used in authentic contexts. The dictionary also provides extensive help with grammar, including grammar patterns for many of the examples, and a grammar reference in the supplement. A wide range of vocabulary-building features, many of them with full-colour illustrations, encourage students to expand and improve their accuracy and fluency. The dictionary also includes a Visual Thesaurus, which provides alternatives to the 50 most over-used words in English; an Activity Guide, which helps students learn how to get the most out of the dictionary; a Writer's Handbook, which gives guidance on spelling, punctuation, letter-writing and CVs, and a Speaker's Handbook, which gives advice on the best set phrases to use in specific situations. The Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's Dictionary provides invaluable and detailed guidance on the English language, and is the complete reference tool for learners of English.

English dictionary with over 75000 references.

A lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach to meaning in language that distinguishes between patterns of normal use and creative exploitations of norms. In Lexical Analysis, Patrick Hanks offers a wide-ranging empirical investigation of word use and meaning in language. The book fills the need for a lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach that will help people understand how words go together in collocational patterns and constructions to make meanings. Such an approach is now possible, Hanks writes, because of the availability of new forms of evidence (corpora, the Internet) and the development of new methods of statistical analysis and inferencing. Hanks offers a new theory of language, the Theory of Norms and Exploitations (TNE), which makes a systematic distinction between normal and abnormal usage—between rules for using words normally and rules for exploiting such norms in metaphor and other creative use of language. Using hundreds of carefully chosen citations from corpora and other texts, he shows how matching each use of a word against established contextual patterns plays a large part in determining the meaning of an utterance. His goal is to develop a coherent and practical lexically driven theory of language that takes into account the immense variability of everyday usage and that shows that this variability is rule governed rather than random. Such a theory will complement other theoretical approaches to language, including cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, generative lexicon theory, priming theory, and pattern grammar.

This book is a reference and practice material for pre-intermediate learners of English. All of the most important English grammar points explained in clear and simple language, with warning notes to help you avoid potential problems -- Back cover.

A reference book presenting the most important facts about modern English. It is alphabetically organized and easy to use, compares both British and American usage, focuses on typical errors in many different languages and gives detailed coverage of particular topics.

It is increasingly clear that, in order to understand language as a phenomenon, we must understand the phenomenon of text. Our primary experience of language comes in the form of texts, which embody the complete communicative events through which our language-using lives are lived. These events are shaped by communicative needs, and this shaping is reflected in certain characteristic patterns in the texts. However, the nature of texts and text is still elusive: we know which forms are typically found in text but we do not yet have a full grasp of how they constitute its textuality, how they make a text “tick”. The twelve contributions to this volume show how texts across a wide range of text types hold together by different patterns of chunking and linking. The common purpose in all the contributions is to explore the nature of text patterning as the functional environment within which language operates.

The studies in this volume approach English grammatical patterns in novel ways by interrogating corpora, focusing on patterns in the verb phrase (tense, aspect and modality), the noun phrase (intensification and focus marking), complementation structures and clause combining. Some studies interrogate historical corpora to reconstruct the diachronic development of patterns such as light verb constructions, verb-particle combinations, the be a-verbing progressive and absolute constructions. Other studies analyse synchronic datasets to typify the functions in discourse of, amongst others, tag questions and it-clefts, or to elucidate some long-standing problems in the syntactic analysis of verbal or adjectival complementation patterns, thanks to the empirical detail only corpora can provide. The volume documents the practices that have been developed to guarantee optimal representativeness of corpus data, to formulate definitions of patterns that can be operationalized in extractions, and to build dimensions of variation such as text type and register into rich grammatical descriptions.