Explores the process of word selection in second language use and the factors which determine the writer's choice of words.

This book addresses the key role of phraseology in second language acquisition and instruction. It is divided into three main sections: "Extracting and Describing Phraseological Units "investigates the role played by native and learner corpora in the extraction and description of multiword units, two initial and crucial steps in informing language pedagogy;" Learning Phraseological Units "deals with the learning aspect, an oft-neglected yet essential dimension of phraseology in second/foreign language pedagogy, this section also addresses issues in new literacies; and "Recording and Exploiting Phraseological Units" focuses on pedagogical tools, notably monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and textbooks. This stimulating collection presents cutting edge research in the field and identifies major avenues for future theoretical and applied work. It is of particular relevance to researchers and teachers interested in the patterned nature of language.

Over the last twenty years phraseology has become an important field of pure and applied research in Western European and North American linguistics. In this book the world's leading specialists examine the crucial role played by ready-made word-combinations in language acquisition and adult language use. After a wide-ranging introduction, the book presents full, critical accounts of the main theoretical approaches, analyses the corpus data and phrase typology, and finally considers the application of phraseology to associated disciplines including lexicography, language learning, stylistics, and computational analysis. This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the subject to be published in English.

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.

This book addresses the key role of phraseology in second language acquisition and instruction. It is divided into three main sections: Extracting and Describing Phraseological Units investigates the role played by native and learner corpora in the extraction and description of multiword units, two initial and crucial steps in informing language pedagogy; Learning Phraseological Units deals with the learning aspect, an oft-neglected yet essential dimension of phraseology in second/foreign language pedagogy, this section also addresses issues in new literacies; and Recording and Exploiting Phraseological Units focuses on pedagogical tools, notably monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and textbooks. This stimulating collection presents cutting edge research in the field and identifies major avenues for future theoretical and applied work. It is of particular relevance to researchers and teachers interested in the patterned nature of language.

The papers published in this volume were originally presented at the Sixth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (4-7 July 2004 Granada, Spain) and reflect the latest developments that have taken place in the field of the teaching applications of text corpora, with a special emphasis on their use in the foreign language classroom. The book is divided into three main sections. The first section sets the scene for what this collection of essays aims to be. It deals with the issue of what corpus linguistics can do not only for the understanding of the nature of language itself but also for so fundamental and miraculous a matter such as language learning and language acquisition. The second section tackles the issues of corpus design and corpus exploitation and provides the reader with a great variety of evidence in favour of corpora exploitation for the building of a successful teaching environment. The final section deals with practical applications of corpora in the foreign language classroom. Although each of the papers here reports particular experiences in very different teaching and learning contexts, as a whole they show that corpora can be used on the spot in a language teaching context by teachers and learners without extensive training in computational tools, and studies of linguistics features can be tailored to specific pedagogic context and learning requirements. The book represents a solid contribution to linguistic studies and language teaching and it is a good example of the diversity of the scientific lines in which corpus linguistics is involved at the present moment.

This volume presents the results of the international symposium Chunks in Corpus Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, held at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg to honour John Sinclair's contribution to the development of linguistics in the second half of the twentieth century. The main theme of the book, highlighting important aspects of Sinclair's work, is the idiomatic character of language with a focus on chunks (in the sense of prefabricated items) as extended units of meaning. To pay tribute to Sinclair's enormous impact on research in this field, the volume contains two contributions which deal explicitly with his work, including material from unpublished manuscripts. Beyond that, the articles cover different aspects of chunks ranging from more theoretically-oriented to more applied papers, in which foreign language teaching and the computational application of the insights about the nature of language provided by corpus research play an important role. The volume demonstrates the wide applicability and relevance of the notion of chunks by bringing together research from different fields of linguistics such as theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and foreign language teaching, and thus provides an interdisciplinary view on the impact of idiomaticity in language.

Long regarded as a peripheral issue, phraseology is now taking centre stage in a wide range of fields. This recent explosion of interest undoubtedly has a great deal to do with the development of corpus linguistics research, which has both demonstrated the key role of phraseological expressions in language and provided researchers with automated methods of extraction and analysis. The aim of this volume is to take stock of current research in phraseology from a variety of perspectives: theoretical, descriptive, contrastive, cultural, lexicographic and computational. It contains overview chapters by leading experts in the field and a series of case studies focusing on a wide range of multiword units: collocations, similes, idioms, routine formulae and recurrent phrases. The volume is an invitation for experienced phraseologists to look at the field with different eyes and a useful introduction for the many researchers who are intrigued by phraseology but need help in finding their way in this rich but complex domain.

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.

Are collocations problems or solutions to problems? If you take the perspective of the foreign learner, as in traditional phraseology, they are certainly challenging, and they have therefore been categorized as arbitrary, or even defective, deviations from an assumed norm of full compositionality. This is a paradox because their ubiquity in language and their importance for language proficiency are undisputed. The book provides a critical review of the traditional phraseological approach to collocations with its classical categories and its roots in structural and generative linguistics as well as traditional Russian phraseology. Instead, it proposes a theory of collocations as an independent functional domain, no longer characterized as “odd comings-together of words” that are neither fully compositional nor fully idiomatic. It fills a research gap and should appeal to phraseologists and cognitive linguists as well as psycholinguists, neurolinguists, corpus linguists, PhD-students and other advanced students of linguistics who are interested in exploring collocations as a language resource and may be interested in contributing to it.