Collocations as a Language Resource


Book Description

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.




Language Processing in Advanced Learners of English


Book Description

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’.




Researching Collocations in Another Language


Book Description

This volume brings together original research in the four areas of L2 collocation learner corpora, L2 collocation lexicographic and classroom materials, L2 collocation knowledge assessment, and L2 collocation learner processes. Each area is covered by three research chapters and a dedicated commentary chapter by experts in the field.




Formulaic Language


Book Description

This book is the second of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first in the field. The authors of the papers in this volume represent a diverse group of international scholars in linguistics and psychology. The language data analyzed come from a variety of languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and include analyses of styles and genres within these languages. While the first volume focuses on the very definition of linguistic formulae and on their grammatical, semantic, stylistic, and historical aspects, the second volume explores how formulae are acquired and lost by speakers of a language, in what way they are psychologically real, and what their functions in discourse are. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research.




Collocations Extra Book with CD-ROM


Book Description

A collection of photocopiable activities which present and practise frequent and useful collocations.




Phraseology


Book Description

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.




Collocations in a Learner Corpus


Book Description

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.




On Second Language Learner Acquisition of English Collocations


Book Description

Collocations are words that commonly co-occur, such as ‘jury’ and ‘verdict.’ Collocational fluency is an essential aspect of second language fluency. Learning a language via collocations improves upon the efficacy of language acquisition because it essentially kills three birds with one stone: students learn vocabulary, collocations, and also subconsciously absorb the grammar patterns of language through mastery of these chunks of language. This is, in fact, similar to the way native speakers learn language and an efficient way to become fluent. This book will detail efforts to create and then apply a methodology to develop a large-scale high-frequency collocation list and custom-tailored collocation resources for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean learners to study directly and for practitioners to utilize as reference materials to create additional resources. Presented in this book is a novel approach taken to fill a major gap in the research and to create large-scale resources that were previously unavailable. Therefore, this book should be considered a valuable contribution to research that aims to help second language learners more effectively achieve fluency in English as a second language.




Lexical collocations in bilingual dictionaries


Book Description

Elusive yet intuitive at the same time, the concept of collocation has attracted the attention of different branches of linguistics for many a year, owing to the proven pervasiveness of such combinations in languages. Although a universally accepted definition of collocation has not been reached as each attempted description is inextricably related to the linguist’s standpoint, the development of a series of very workable ideas on the nature of these combinations has led to the production of worthy linguistic commodities. While English lexicography has kept pace with the development in lexicology and corpus linguistics, Italian lexicography has only recently started to look in that direction. The author investigates the treatment of lexical collocations in the major bilingual English-Italian dictionaries, looking closely at the lexicographers’ choices while keeping the end users and their heuristics in mind.




Syntax-Based Collocation Extraction


Book Description

Syntax-Based Collocation Extraction is the first book to offer a comprehensive, up-to-date review of the theoretical and applied work on word collocations. Backed by solid theoretical results, the computational experiments described based on data in four languages provide support for the book’s basic argument for using syntax-driven extraction as an alternative to the current cooccurrence-based extraction techniques to efficiently extract collocational data. The work described in Syntax-Based Collocation Extraction focuses on using linguistic tools for corpus-based identification of collocations. It takes advantage of recent advances in parsing to propose a novel deep syntactic analytic collocation extraction that has applicability to a range of important core tasks in Computational Linguistics. The book is useful for anyone interested in computational analysis of texts, collocation phenomena, and multi-word expressions in general.