English collocation studies:the OSTI report

This is the first published edition of John Sinclair, Susan Jones and Robert Daley's research on collocation undertaken in 1970. The unpublished report was circulated amongst a small group of academics and was enormously influential, sparking a growth of interest in collocation amongst researchers in linguistics. Collocation was first viewed as important in computational linguistics in the work of Harold Palmer in Japan. Later M.A.K. Halliday and John Sinclair published on collocation in the 1960s. English Collocation Studies is a report on empirical research into collocation, devised by Halliday with Sinclair acting as the Principal Investigator and editor of the resultant OSTI report. The present edition contains an introduction by Professor Wolfgang Teubert based on his interview with John Sinclair. The introduction assesses the extent to which the findings of the original research have developed in the intervening years, and how some of the techniques mentioned in the report were implemented in the COBUILD project at Birmingham University in the 1980s.

Corpus, collocation, and lexical sets

This paper is a progress report on a research path I first outlined in my contribution to “Words in Context: A Tribute to John Sinclair on his Retirement” (Heffer and Sauntson, 2000). Therefore, I first summarize that paper here, in order to provide the relevant background. The second half of the current paper consists of some further manual analyses, exploring various parameters and procedures that might assist in the design of an automated computational process for the identification of lexical sets. The automation itself is beyond the scope of the current paper.

Burning questions, but no burning answers: collocation and idiomaticity

The attention of linguists has increasingly shifted from grammar to lexis. Collocation has emerged as a key feature of lexis. Research using large language corpora has not only helped to identify the significant collocates of individual words but also to confirm the importance of collocation in the language system. John Sinclair has suggested that language operates on two principles: open choice and idiom. If so, then collocation would appear to be the minimal level of idiomaticity. One problem with collocation is that words that habitually co-occur form less distinct, often discontinuous, idiomatic units, whereas grammar generally works with more precisely delineated and contiguous structural units. This paper uses examples from corpus evidence to look at various aspects of collocation.

Optimization of chemical plant simulation using double collocation

A method has been constructed for the solution of a wide range of chemical plant simulation models including differential equations and optimization. Double orthogonal collocation on finite elements is applied to convert the model into an NLP problem that is solved either by the VF 13AD package based on successive quadratic programming, or by the GRG2 package, based on the generalized reduced gradient method. This approach is termed simultaneous optimization and solution strategy. The objective functional can contain integral terms. The state and control variables can have time delays. Equalities and inequalities containing state and control variables can be included into the model as well as algebraic equations and inequalities. The maximum number of independent variables is 2. Problems containing 3 independent variables can be transformed into problems having 2 independent variables using finite differencing. The maximum number of NLP variables and constraints is 1500. The method is also suitable for solving ordinary and partial differential equations. The state functions are approximated by a linear combination of Lagrange interpolation polynomials. The control function can either be approximated by a linear combination of Lagrange interpolation polynomials or by a piecewise constant function over finite elements. The number of internal collocation points can vary by finite elements. The residual error is evaluated at arbitrarily chosen equidistant grid-points, thus enabling the user to check the accuracy of the solution between collocation points, where the solution is exact. The solution functions can be tabulated. There is an option to use control vector parameterization to solve optimization problems containing initial value ordinary differential equations. When there are many differential equations or the upper integration limit should be selected optimally then this approach should be used. The portability of the package has been addressed converting the package from V AX FORTRAN 77 into IBM PC FORTRAN 77 and into SUN SPARC 2000 FORTRAN 77. Computer runs have shown that the method can reproduce optimization problems published in the literature. The GRG2 and the VF I 3AD packages, integrated into the optimization package, proved to be robust and reliable. The package contains an executive module, a module performing control vector parameterization and 2 nonlinear problem solver modules, GRG2 and VF I 3AD. There is a stand-alone module that converts the differential-algebraic optimization problem into a nonlinear programming problem.

Collocation:applications and implications

All aspects of the concept of collocation – the phenomenon whereby words naturally tend to occur in the company of a restricted set of other words – are covered in this book. It deals in detail with the history of the word collocation, the concepts associated with it and its use in a linguistic context. The authors show the practical means by which the collocational behaviour of words can be explored using illustrative computer programs and examine applications in teaching, lexicography and natural language processing that use collocation in formation. The book investigates the place that collocation occupies in theories of language and provides a thoroughly comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the current position of collocation in language studies and applied linguistics. This text presents a comprehensive description of collocation, covering both the theoretical and practical background and the implications and applications of the concept as language model and analytical tool. It provides a definitive survey of currently available techniques and a detailed description of their implementation.

Collocation, interpretation and explanation:the case of just any

This article discusses the question of compositionality by examining whether the indiscriminacy reading of the collocation of just with any can be shown to be a consequence of the schematic meaning-potential of each of these two items. A comparison of justwith other restrictive focus particles allows its schematic meaning to be defined as that of goodness of fit. Any is defined as representing an indefinite member of a set as extractable from the set in exactly the same way as each of the other members thereof. The collocation just any often gives rise to a scalar reading oriented towards the lowest value on the scale due to the fact that focus on the unconstrained extractability of a random indefinite item brings into consideration even marginal cases and the latter tend to be interpreted as situated on the lower end of the scale. The attention to low-end values also explains why just any is regularly found with the adjective old, the prepositional phrase at all and various devaluating expressions. It is concluded that the meanings of the component parts of this collocation do indeed account for the meaning of the whole, and that an appropriate methodology allows identification of linguistic meanings and their interrelations. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.

An action research study with low proficiency learners in Japan to promote the learning of vocabulary through collocations.

This action research (AR) study explores an alternative approach to vocabulary instruction for low-proficiency university students: a change from targeting individual words from the general service list (West, 1953) to targeting frequent verb + noun collocations. A review of the literature indicated a focus on collocations instead of individual words could potentially address the students’ productive challenges with targeted vocabulary. Over the course of four reflective cycles, this thesis addresses three main aspects of collocation instruction. First, it examines if the students believe studying collocations is more useful than studying individual lexical items. Second, the thesis investigates whether a focus on collocations will lead to improvements in spoken fluency. This is tested through a comparison of a pre-intervention spoken assessment task with the findings from the same task completed 15 weeks later, after the intervention. Third, the thesis explores different procedures for the instructing of collocations under the classroom constraints of a university teaching context. In the first of the four reflective cycles, data is collected which indicates that the students believe a focus on collocations is superior to only teaching individual lexical items, that in the students’ opinion their productive abilities with the targeted structures has improved, and that delexicalized verb collocations are problematic for low-proficiency students. Reflective cycle two produces evidence indicating that productive tasks are superior to receptive tasks for fluency development. In reflective cycle three, productively challenging classroom tasks are investigated further and the findings indicate that tasks with higher productive demands result in greater improvements in spoken fluency. The fourth reflective cycle uses a different type of collocation list: frequent adjective + noun collocations. Despite this change, the findings remain consistent in that certain types of collocations are problematic for low-proficiency language learners and that the evidence shows productive tasks are necessary to improve the students’ spoken ability.

Collocations

J R Firth first gave prominence to collacation in linguistic theory. Halliday, Sinclair, Stubbs, and Hoey have all extended Firth's ideas. Palmer and Hornby recognized the pedagogical value of collocation, and incorporated it into their early EFL dictionaries. More recent EFL dictionaries, based on large, computerized language corpora, have used complex software and statistical measures to gain further insights into the way that collocational patterns are woven into language, and the results are visible in the dictionary entries of later editions. This has fed back into language pedagogy, and is also influencing translation and computational research. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

On the F word:a corpus-based analysis of the media representation of feminism in British and German press discourse, 1990-2009

Research in social psychology has shown that public attitudes towards feminism are mostly based on stereotypical views linking feminism with leftist politics and lesbian orientation. It is claimed that such attitudes are due to the negative and sexualised media construction of feminism. Studies concerned with the media representation of feminism seem to confirm this tendency. While most of this research provides significant insights into the representation of feminism, the findings are often based on a small sample of texts. Also, most of the research was conducted in an Anglo-American setting. This study attempts to address some of the shortcomings of previous work by examining the discourse of feminism in a large corpus of German and British newspaper data. It does so by employing the tools of Corpus Linguistics. By investigating the collocation profiles of the search term feminism, we provide evidence of salient discourse patterns surrounding feminism in two different cultural contexts. © The Author(s) 2012.