Making sense of collostructional analysis

Abstract

This paper looks at the ways of refining the technique of collostructional analysis, and more precisely multiple distinctive collexeme analysis, by taking word senses into account. It presents the main results of a sense-based multiple distinctive collexeme analysis of the non-finite verb slot of English periphrastic causative constructions and shows how these results compare with those of a lemma-based analysis of the same data. The study reveals that the different senses of a verb tend to be attracted to different constructions and that integrating sense into the analysis not only makes the interpretation of the data more straightforward and more reliable, but also provides information that would otherwise have to be obtained by means of other techniques.