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Abstract
The meanings of collocations, which have been accepted as an abstraction at the syntagmatic level, may have been defined by the way human beings conceptualize the world. The patterns in the use of the English word “contain” are summarized using the British National Corpus and an attempt is made to use conceptual metaphors to interpret how these patterns came into being and how they could have derived from human beings’ earliest bodily experience in the physical world. Such insight into English collocations may help improve the teaching of collocations to EFL learners.
Highlights
The late twentieth century and early twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence and rapid development of both corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics, which have opened new dimensions in the study of linguistics
Corpus linguistics employs empirical evidence to examine how language is used in reality and what they reveal about language use and cognitive linguistics aims at establishing the link between language and the way humans perceive and interact with the world
Since the present study is to examine how certain collocations of English words, “contain” in this particular case, might have been determined conceptually before they entered discourse, the collocations of the given word have to be identified first and these collocations are to be understood in light of conceptual metaphors
Summary
The late twentieth century and early twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence and rapid development of both corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics, which have opened new dimensions in the study of linguistics. Corpus linguistics employs empirical evidence to examine how language is used in reality and what they reveal about language use and cognitive linguistics aims at establishing the link between language and the way humans perceive and interact with the world. Both emphasize the importance of language in use and the combination of the two will undoubtedly throw more light on language use. Renowned corpus linguists like Wolfgang Teubert once explicitly expressed the impossibility of integrating corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics Teubert believed that the latter is flawed in at least one of its basic assumptions, that is, meaning is governed by man’s conceptualization of the world. The present study is an attempt to bring the two fields together to gain new insights into the use of English words, especially by combining the study of collocation in corpus linguistics with Lakoff and Johnson’s research findings in the study of conceptual metaphors
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