This book re-examines the notion of word associations, more precisely collocations. It attempts to come to a potentially more generally applicable definition of collocation and how to best extract, identify and measure collocations. The book highlights the role played by (i) automatic linguistic annotation (part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, etc.), (ii) using semantic criteria to facilitate the identification of collocations, (iii) multi-word structured, instead of the widespread assumption of bipartite collocational structures, for capturing the intricacies of the phenomenon of syntagmatic attraction, (iv) considering collocation and valency as near neighbours in the lexis-grammar continuum and (v) the mathematical properties of statistical association measures in the automatic extraction of collocations from corpora. This book is an ideal guide to the use of statistics in collocation analysis and lexicography, as well as a practical text to the development of skills in the application of computational lexicography. Lexical Collocation Analysis: Advances and Applications begins with a proposal for integrating both collocational and valency phenomena within the overarching theoretical framework of construction grammar. Next the book makes the case for integrating advances in syntactic parsing and in collocational analysis. Chapter 3 offers an innovative look at complementing corpus data and dictionaries in the identification of specific types of collocations consisting of restricted predicate-argument combinations. This strategy complements corpus collocational data with network analysis techniques applied to dictionary entries. Chapter 4 explains the potential of collocational graphs and networks both as a visualization tool and as an analytical technique. Chapter 5 introduces MERGE (Multi-word Expressions from the Recursive Grouping of Elements), a data-driven approach to the identification and extraction of multi-word expressions from corpora. Finally the book concludes with an analysis and evaluation of factors influencing the performance of collocation extraction methods in parsed corpora.

This book is written for both linguists and computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence as well as to anyone interested in intelligent text processing. Lexical function is a concept that formalizes semantic and syntactic relations between lexical units. Collocational relation is a type of institutionalized lexical relations which holds between the base and its partner in a collocation. Knowledge of collocation is important for natural language processing because collocation comprises the restrictions on how words can be used together. The book shows how collocations can be annotated with lexical functions in a computer readable dictionary - allowing their precise semantic analysis in texts and their effective use in natural language applications including parsers, high quality machine translation, periphrasis system and computer-aided learning of lexica. The books shows how to extract collocations from corpora and annotate them with lexical functions automatically. To train algorithms, the authors created a dictionary of lexical functions containing more than 900 Spanish disambiguated and annotated examples which is a part of this book. The obtained results show that machine learning is feasible to achieve the task of automatic detection of lexical functions.

The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) surveys the breadth of corpus-based linguistic research on English, including chapters on collocations, phraseology, grammatical variation, historical change, and the description of registers and dialects. The most innovative aspects of the CHECL are its emphasis on critical discussion, its explicit evaluation of the state of the art in each sub-discipline, and the inclusion of empirical case studies. While each chapter includes a broad survey of previous research, the primary focus is on a detailed description of the most important corpus-based studies in this area, with discussion of what those studies found, and why they are important. Each chapter also includes a critical discussion of the corpus-based methods employed for research in this area, as well as an explicit summary of new findings and discoveries.

This edited collection presents the state of the art in research related to lexical combinations and their restrictions in Spanish from a variety of theoretical approaches, ranging from Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology to Distributed Morphology and Generative Lexicon Theory. Section 1 offers a presentation of the main theoretical and descriptive approaches to collocation. Section 2 explores collocation from the point of view of its lexicographical representation, while Section 3 offers a pedagogical perspective. Section 4 surveys current research on collocation in Catalan, Galician and Basque. Collocations and other lexical combinations in Spanish will be of interest to students of Hispanic linguistics.

The present study investigated differences on the knowledge and use of collocations between French and Japanese learners with regard to: 1) L1 influence; and 2) combinability and transparency influence. The test materials included four categories of the lexical collocations: 1) verb + noun; 2) delexicalised verb + noun; 3) adjective + noun; and 4) adverb + adjective. The two types of tasks, Multiple Choice Question Tasks and Translation Tasks, are performed, and the learner corpora are also investigated in order to examine whether the learners from different L1 backgrounds demonstrate different results. Though L1 influence by both French and Japanese learners was demonstrated, the Japanese learners showed a greater L1 influence in the [adjective ] noun] category than the French learners. The investigation also found that L1 influence does not necessarily result in accuracy of the collocations. With regard to the combinability and transparency influence, the results of the two types of tasks followed Kellerman's (1978) remark. However, some contrasted results were also identified in learner corpus investigation. Thus the combinability and transparency influence were not necessarily identified. The results of the present study have a potential to improve teaching/learning of collocations through recognizing the learners' tendencies of learning collocations.

The production and processing of collocations and formulaic language is a field of growing interest in corpus linguistics and experimental psycholinguistics. In the past this fascinating field at the interface of grammar and the lexicon has been mainly studied based on English native speakers, while research focusing on second language speakers and language learners has been comparatively rare. This book proposes an integration of corpus-based and experimental methods by analysing language processing of collocation by advanced learners of English. In using corpus-derived collocational stimuli of native-like and learner-typical language use in an experimental setting, it shows how advanced German L1 learners of English process native-like collocations, L1-based interferences and non-collocating lexical combinations. This book is of interest to anyone interested in the psycholinguistic validity of collocation from a bilingual point of view, as it explores methods of tracking collocational processing of speakers working with different sets of ‘collocational preferences’.

Collocations are both pervasive in language and difficult for language learners, even at an advanced level. In this book, these difficulties are for the first time comprehensively investigated. On the basis of a learner corpus, idiosyncratic collocation use by learners is uncovered, the building material of learner collocations examined, and the factors that contribute to the difficulty of certain groups of collocations identified. An extensive discussion of the implications of the results for the foreign language classroom is also presented, and the contentious issue of the relation of corpus linguistic research and language teaching is thus extended to learner corpus analysis.

This study examines the use of one category of prefabricated language (restricted lexical collocations) in native and non-native academic English in the social sciences, in an attempt to throw light on a neglected aspect of learner competence. It first surveys the existing theoretical viewpoints on word combinations and then reviews experimental research into the psycholinguistic processing of prefabricated language, which suggest that the role of conventional expressions is to facilitate fluent production and rapid comprehension. A computer-based corpus of native academic writing is analysed to discover to what extent and how such collocations are used in formal written English. Conventionality of style, it is suggested, aids precision of expression, clearly a quality highly valued in academic argument. A corpus of non-native writing is then subjected to a similar analysis. While the collocational errors learners make do not on the whole seriously destroy intelligibility, they can lead to a lack of precision and obscure the clarity of expression required in academic communication. Pedagogical implications are then considered, and it is seen that for the most part published teaching materials have failed to recognize the nature of collocations in general and offer little help. The final part of the study examines the treatment of restricted collocations in both general and phraseological dictionaries for learners. These are evaluated on their selection and presentation of collocations shown by the preceding research to be problematic for advanced learners. The conclusion suggests that, for such learners, who are mostly studying the language independently, good reference works are needed in the form of specialist collocational dictionaries. The results of this research help to establish principles for the design of such dictionaries.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, Technical University of Braunschweig (Englisches Seminar), course: Teaching English Grammar and Lexis, language: English, abstract: The theory and methodology of early linguistics took the notion of structure as a key term and emphasized the idea that language needed to be organized. In the 70s, under the influence of pragmatics, language was no longer seen as an abstraction, but as a means of communication between people, and the primary purpose of language became the exchange of meaning. Since language essentially deals with naming of concepts, the importance of lexis replaced the role played by grammatical structure. The idea was that meaning is primarily carried by lexis, because focus on communication implies emphasis on lexis and decreased emphasis on structure. In this paper, I will discuss the central ideas of Saussurean structuralism, in particular the notion of differential structure, then I will present the innovation brought in linguistics by Chomsky’s generative structure, namely the universal nature of language as opposed to Sassure’s idea about the uniqueness of language, and finally, I will analyze collocations in the light of these two structuralist theories. This paper does not intend to show the differences and incompatibilities between the structural and lexical approaches, but the point of coincidence and agreement between the two, namely the way meaning is defined through difference under the exercise of choice.