140 likes | 436 Views
Corpus Linguistics 2012. Session 3: Collocation http://tinyurl.com/669o4zt. Repeated, habitual co-occurence of certain words or phrases. “You shall know a word by the company that it keeps” (J.R.Firth). Collocation. cause. Ways of approaching collocation.
E N D
Corpus Linguistics 2012 Session 3: Collocation http://tinyurl.com/669o4zt
Repeated, habitual co-occurence of certain words or phrases. “You shall know a word by the company that it keeps” (J.R.Firth) Collocation
Ways of approaching collocation • You can explore via 'corpus, concordance, collocation'. • Note also colligation - patterns of grammatical co-occurrence. • Semantic prosody (patterns of words with similar meanings), • It is often interesting to compare the collocational behaviour of synonyms, or near synonyms, e.g. strong and powerful. • An interesting cross-linguistic comparative study: Collocation, Semantic Prosody, and Near Synonymy: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective, Richard Xiao and Tony McEnery, University of Lancaster. Applied Linguistics 2006 27(1):103-129. http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/27/1/103
A critical look at collocation There is often a crude typography of 'prosodies': negative/neutral/positive • What is the benchmark for norms for 'negativity' in the text/corpus/genre? How 'negative' are texts in the corpus in general? • Difficult to disentangle the various forms of multi-word expression: collocations, compounds, idioms, n-grams, etc.... • What are the units of meaning? Do words collocate with other words, or phrases, or more complex and variable structures? • Idiom principle v. open choice principle (Sinclair, John (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford, Oxford University Press, especially chapter 8)
Some more words and phrases What are the collocational profiles of: • aftermath • borrow • on the edge of • on the verge of • on the brink of
Looking at collocations • BNCweb (Oxford log-in, experimental service): https://ota.oerc.ox.ac.uk/bncweb-cgi/BNCweb.pl • BNCweb at Lancaster (register, restricted number of hits): http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/bncwebSignup/user/login.php • AntConc (download to use with your own corpus): http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/antconc_index.html • Corpora at Brigham Young University (web-based large corpora, incl BNC and COCA): http://corpus.byu.edu/
Tip of the week Oxford Corpus Group Friday 10 February, 4 pm OUCS Pete Whitelock (Head of Language Engineering and Dictionaries at Oxford University Press): Oxford English Corpus: how it's collected, how it's analysed, how it's used. (low-traffic) email list: corpora-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk
next week... 4. Corpus Linguistics: Annotation In this session we will be looking at key methods and problems of applying linguistic annotation to a corpus, and how to use the annotated corpus. Key topics: • annotation • tagging/tags/tag-set • word class
Corpus Linguistics Session 3: Collocation http://tinyurl.com/669o4zt