Collocation Dictionary Research Articles

Collocation Dictionaries: A Comparative Analysis

The importance of phraseological information in lexicographic resources is experiencing an exponential growth. This is evident in the publication in recent years of a wide variety of combinatorial or collocation dictionaries. This paper describes and compares the main monolingual collocation dictionaries for English and Spanish in regards to the following: (i) types of collocation encoded; (ii) kinds of collocational information offered; (iii) place for collocations in the micro or macrostructure of the dictionary. The objective of this analysis is to study the usefulness of these resources for translators.

Analyzing EFL Learners’ Errors: The Plausibility of Teachers’ Feedbacks and Students’ Uptakes

This paper aims to investigate the difficulties Libyan undergraduate university English major students have in the use of verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations by looking at their performance in free production. Furthermore, twelve verbs and twelve adjectives identified in this research were investigated in depth as part of their combinations. To achieve this aim, a 250-word academic writing task was used to collect data from fourth-year university students at Tripoli University. The data were analysed using AntConc 3.2.1w (Anthony, 2007). After extracting the learners’ collocations, four methods were used to determine the acceptability of learners’ collocations in terms of conforming to native-like use. They were: (1) the Oxford Collocations Dictionary (2009), (2) the online British National Corpus (3) consultations with two native speakers [1] , and (4) the acceptability-of-collocations survey, which was used to triangulate the above three methods. Overall, the results from the academic writing data revealed that (1) verb-noun collocations were more difficult for the participants than adjective-noun collocations; and (2) the participants’ use of the twelve adjectives in adjective-noun collocations showed significantly more accuracy ratings compared to their use of the twelve verbs in verb-noun collocations. [1] According to Crystal (1997), the term native-speaker is used in the linguistic field to refer to “someone for whom a particular LANGUAGE is a ‘native language’ (also called ‘first language’, ‘mother-tongue’)”. The implication is the acquisition of this language has taken place since childhood. Therefore, it can be safely asserted that a native speaker possesses the most reliable intuition and for that reason has the best judgement of how the language is used, making him/her the most trusted kind of informant.

ENGLISH COLLOCATIONS OF THE VERBS “TO BE”, “TO HAVE” AND “TO TAKE” AND THEIR EQUIVALENTS IN GERMAN, FRENCH AND ITALIAN LANGUAGES: LINGUISTIC–CULTURAL ASPECT

The aim of this research is to find out conceptual characteristics of English, German, French, Italian languages world image. The subject of this paper is English collocations with the verbs “to be”, “to have” and “to take” and their equivalents in German, French and Italian languages. The task of this paper is to compare English collocations of the verbs “to be”, “to have” and “to take” and their equivalents in German, French and Italian languages in linguistic–cultural aspect. In Russian language studies such word groups are called “synlexis”. This term was coined by G. I. Klimovskaya, the professor ofTomskStateUniversity. The main method of the research is a comparative study of linguistic units. The conclusions made in the research are essential in the further study of European linguistic world image and can be used in textbooks on Cultural Linguistics. The practical result of the research can be a cross-cultural collocation dictionary of some languages. Such a dictionary is important for linguists, translators and people studying foreign languages. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12731/2218-7405-2013-8-32

Incorporating Frequency Information in a Collocation Dictionary: Establishing a Methodology

This paper describes the methodology applied to incorporate frequency information in the Diccionario de Colocaciones del Español, a dictionary developed within the framework of Explanatory and Combinatorial Lexicology. The main reasons for including lexical frequency information in DiCE were to enrich the dictionary content with information potentially useful for language learners, and to filter currently listed collocates. Obtaining and providing frequency information on collocations is not a straightforward task. In our case, we have opted for assigning a frequency score to each individual lexical unit which constitutes the base of a collocation, while collocations are assigned a frequency score taking into account both the absolute frequency of the collocation itself and the frequency of the lexical unit constituting its base. As a result, collocates are presented in the dictionary under the lexical entry of the base organized according to their syntactic pattern and their meaning, and ordered according to their frequency. Through assigning frequency scores to collocations we also foresee obtaining a frequency list of all collocations included in DiCE, valuable for language teaching and testing purposes.

The Structure of an Afrikaans Collocation and Phrase Dictionary

In this article an Afrikaans collocation and phrase dictionary for mother-tongue speakers (primary target group) as well as advanced learners (secondary target group) is discussed. The position which such a dictionary occupies among other dictionary types is pointed out. A motivation is also given for the inclusion of idioms and other fixed phrases in the proposed dictionary. The three key approaches with regard to the interpretation of the term collocation are examined, i.e. the text-oriented approach of Halliday and Hasan (1976), the statistically-oriented approach of Sinclair (Collins Cobuild) and the significance-oriented approach of Hausmann (1984). The arguments in this article favour Benson et al.’s (1986) implementation of the significance-oriented approach. Statistical evidence could be used to examine the usage frequency of collocations and phrases. The advantages and/or disadvantages of these approaches are considered. Three types of words and their treatment in the dictionary are discussed: those which have a very wide range of combination, those which have selectional restrictions imposed by general semantic features, and those of which the range of combination is restricted by certain other words. It is argued that only the last two types should be included in this dictionary. As one of the target groups is unsophisticated learners with a limited grammatical background, the ideal would be to enter lexical collocations both at their bases and at the collocators. To save space however, more information such as examples could then be provided at the bases only. Grammatical collocations should be entered at the bases, i.e. nouns, verbs and adjectives. The division of the dictionary articles into two components to meet the needs of both intended target groups, is discussed.

Automatic Construction of Collocation Dictionary Based on Text Mining

A collocation dictionary is a useful component to many natural language and spoken language processing application, such as grammar checking, text-speech conversion and machine translation. Currently the collocation dictionary is constructed by human. Firstly, it may not be updated frequently and many lexicon entries may be not available. Secondly, to construct such a dictionary may need lots of human resources. In this paper, a data-mining approach for constructing a collocation dictionary is surveyed. The main purpose is to enable cheap and quick acquisition of a collocation dictionary from a large-scale text corpus. Experimental results show the approach is effective and suitability.

NEGATIVE TRANSFER OF INDONESIAN COLLOCATIONS INTO ENGLISH AND IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

One of the most challenging problems for EFL students is to be able to express themselves not just grammatically but also acceptably and naturally in English in appropriate contexts. The ability to produce acceptable and natural expressions in English is closely related to the EFL students’ competence in collocation—which words go together in normal usage. The present study provides an empirical analysis on negative transfer made by Indonesian EFL students in lexical collocation and recommends practical ways to help students improve their competence in collocation. Data for the study was collected from essays written by 40 EFL university students majoring in English in Indonesia whose native language is Indonesian. The students were asked to write a two- to three-page essay on an assigned topic. Of 445 lexical collocation errors found in the English writing, 321 (72%) were negative transfers of Indonesian lexical collocations into English. The findings suggest the necessity of direct teaching of collocations, the use of The Collins WordbanksOnline, and the need to design bilingual collocation dictionaries.<br />Keywords: Negative Transfer, Lexical Collocation, Indonesian Collocation, Acceptable Collocation<br /><br />

Collocation Dictionaries as Inductive Learning Resources in Data-Driven Learning - An Analysis and Evaluation

Advocacy of corpus-based data-driven learning (DDL) in foreign language learning classrooms has grown in recent years, though DDL has not become particularly widespread in practice. In the same period of time, there has been considerable publishing activity of corpus-based collocation dictionaries; however, the possible role that collocation dictionaries may play in DDL has not, to date, been considered. This paper seeks to analyse what contribution four English monolingual collocation dictionaries might make to ‘soft’ DDL inductive learning activities in the classroom. The paper provides a description and comparison of the dictionaries, and examines and compares the data provided by concordance lines for a series of DDL questions, with data from the collocation dictionaries. The paper ends by making a number of recommendations for the inductive use of the four collocation dictionaries, and suggests ways in which the dictionaries might be adapted to such usage.

THE CASE FOR VERB-ADJECTIVE COLLOCATIONS: CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS AND LEXICOGRAPHICAL TREATMENT

This article explores a type of co-occurrence pattern which cannot be adequately described by existing models of collocation, and for which combinatory dictionaries have yet failed to provide sufficient information. The phenomenon of “oblique inter-collocation”, as I propose to call it, is characterised by a concatenation of syntagmatic preferences which partially contravenes the habitual grammatical order of semantic selection. In particular, I will examine some of the effects which the verb cause exerts on the distribution of attributive adjectives in the context of specific noun classes. The procedure for detecting and describing patterns of oblique inter-collocation is illustrated by means of SketchEngine corpus query tools. Based on the data extracted from a large-scale corpus, this paper carries out a critical analysis of the micro-structure in Oxford Collocations Dictionary.

A New Pedagogical Dictionary of English Collocations

A New Pedagogical Dictionary of English Collocations

Kolokacije v poslovni angleščini

V članku smo po kratkem teoretičnem uvodu in opredelitvi pojma kolokacije predstavili korpusno raziskavo, kjer smo s pomočjo konkordančnega programa WordSmith Tools iskali odgovor na vprašanje, katere so najpogostejše leksikalne kolokacije v poslovnem angleškem jeziku. Izhajali smo predpostavke, da je angleški jezik sestavljen predvsem iz različnih (spremenljivih) frazeoloških enot ter da proste besedne zveze in tudi popolnoma "zamrznjene" besedne zveze predstavljajo le manjši del jezika. Angleščina je torej jezik kolokacij, zato domnevamo, da to velja tudi za jezik stroke in poslovni angleški jezik. Zanimala nas je tudi zastopanost ugotovljenih najpogostejših kolokacij v vodilnih kolokacijskih slovarjih in s tem njihova ustreznost za potrebe poslovne angleščine.

Korpusbasierte Wörterbucharbeit mit den Daten des Projekts Deutscher Wortschatz

The corpus project Deutscher Wortschatz (German Vocabulary) at Leipzig University is collecting and processing textual data for 15 years. It now consists of approx. 2 billion running words in 160 million sentences. The dictionary is online available at www.wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de and, moreover, contains word co-occurrence data. The pre-processing of the data used mainly language independent methods and were used for corpora in other languages, too. The paper describes the production process for three dictionaries for which these corpus data were used: a thesaurus, a dictionary of neologisms, and a collocation dictionary. In all cases, the raw data for the dictionary entries were produced automatically, and the final entries were written only using these pre-selections. In the case of the thesaurus, the preprocessing consisted in a corpus based detection of semantically similar words. For the neologism dictionary the yearly frequency information were used and for the collocation dictionary, word co-occurrences and part of speech information were combined.

Gimme Context - Towards New Domain-Specific Collocational Dictionaries

The days of traditional drudgery-filled lexicography are long gone. Fortunately today, computers help in the enormous task of storing and analysing language in order to condense and store the found information in the form of dictionaries. In this paper, the way from a corpus to a small domain-specific collocational dictionary will be described and thus exemplified based on the example of the domain-specific language of mining reclamation, which can be duplicated for other specific languages too. So far, domain-specific dictionaries are mostly rare as their creation is very labour- and thus cost-effective and all too often they are just a collection of terms plus translation without any information on how to use them in speech. Particular small domains which do not involve a lot of users have been disregarded by lexicographers as there is also always the question of how well it sells afterwards. Following this, I will describe the creation of a small collocational dictionary on mining reclamation language which is based on the consequent use of corpus information. It is relatively quick to realize in the design phase and is thought to provide the sort of linguistic information engineering experts need when they communicate in English or read specialist texts in the specific domain. Article in English

Kollokationen in deutschen Wörterbüchern und in der deutschen Wörterbuchforschung

This contribution article focuses on German-language collocation research and lexicographic practice from a corpus linguistic perspective. Although there is no dictionary called “Deutsches Kollokationsworterbuch” (German collocation dictionary), the collocation perspective acquires increasing popularity in linguistic research and dictionary work in the German-speaking area. On the one hand, this tendency is due to the growing number of studies dealing with German as a contrast language and works on foreign language didactics. On the other hand, powerful electronic resources such as large corpora and lexical databases, which are nowadays available for the German language, are recognised as a valuable empirical basis. Nevertheless, the application of novel corpus linguistic methods in lexicographic practice is still unsatisfactory. Therefore, this article concludes by discussing innovative aspects of corpus linguistic empirical research on the basis of collocations. These ideas are presented as an incentive for further research as well as practical application.

『한국어 교육을 위한 한국어 연어 사전』의 편찬

This paper aims at suggesting the ways of developing and editing a learner's collocation dictionary for students which is not just a general language-learning dictionary that helps learners study vocabulary, but shows the syntagmatic lexical relations that help learners use lexemes that they have learned, along with describing the characteristics and limitations of the recently published 〈Korean Collocation Dictionary for Learners〉. This study includes not only the lexical collocations that are predicted naturally from the semantic features, but also those that are not predicted naturally. To do this, this paper first considers the lexical collocational relations, while dividing them into preceding and following collocation relations and second, this paper examines how to describe the aforementioned book, 〈Korean Collocation Dictionary for Learners〉.

A Corpus-Based Approach to Detection of Semantically Similar Nouns Sharing Frequent Cooccurrence Verbs : Application to a Collocation Dictionary

A Corpus-Based Approach to Detection of Semantically Similar Nouns Sharing Frequent Cooccurrence Verbs : Application to a Collocation Dictionary

MAKING A COLLOCATIONS DICTIONARY

This paper seeks to explain the process and principles behind the selection and presentation of collocations in the Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English. It argues for a pragmatic interpretation of the concept of collocation, based firmly on the needs of language learners. Thus, the whole range of collocations is included, from the relatively weak to the strongest and most restricted, but with the greatest emphasis on the “medium-strength” collocations between these two extremes. Judgements were not made as to the “predictability” of particular word combinations. The presentation of the collocations in the dictionary is designed to make selection of the best collocate by the user as intuitive as possible. Where possible, grammar is “pre-digested”, with collocates presented in the form in which they are most likely to be used. Collocates are grouped (but not labelled) according to semantic categories. The aim was to make the dictionary accessible not only to keen linguists, but to all who wish to improve their writing in English, whether interested in the mechanics of the language or not.

Corpus, collocations et dictionnaires d'apprentissage

In this article we would like to show how we conceived the description of the word debat in the Dictionnaire d’apprentissage du francais langue etrangere ou seconde (Dafles), an online semi-multilingual learner’s dictionary of French intended for learners at an intermediate or advanced level. We successively present the delimitation of the different senses (lexies) and the definition style we used, the syntagmatic relations (word syntax and word combinations) and the paradigmatic relations (e. g. the synonyms).For each of these points, we stress the need of a corpus analysis. For the Dafles project we use a corpus of press texts from three important French speaking communities with more than 75 million words.We also compare exhaustively our data with the data found in the most important dictionaries of collocations of French available at this moment. The comparison focuses not only on the selection of the collocations, but also on their modeling.

Corpus, collocations et dictionnaires d'apprentissage

In this article we would like to show how we conceived the description of the word débat in the Dictionnaire d’apprentissage du français langue étrangère ou seconde (Dafles), an online semi-multilingual learner’s dictionary of French intended for learners at an intermediate or advanced level. We successively present the delimitation of the different senses (lexies) and the definition style we used, the syntagmatic relations (word syntax and word combinations) and the paradigmatic relations (e. g. the synonyms).For each of these points, we stress the need of a corpus analysis. For the Dafles project we use a corpus of press texts from three important French speaking communities with more than 75 million words.We also compare exhaustively our data with the data found in the most important dictionaries of collocations of French available at this moment. The comparison focuses not only on the selection of the collocations, but also on their modeling.

The first steps towards the automatic compilation of specialized collocation dictionaries

Collocation dictionaries are essential in specialized discourse for understanding, production, and translation. Especially translation, which is often undertaken by professionals who are not specialists of the field, is in need of dictionaries with detailed syntactic and semantic information on lexical and semantic links between terms. However, collocation dictionaries are hardly available for general, let alone specialized, discourse. The manual compilation of collocation dictionaries from large corpora is a time consuming and cost-intensive procedure. A (partial) automation of this procedure recently became a high-priority topic in computational lexicography. In this article, we discuss how collocations can be acquired from specialized corpora and labeled with semantic tags using machine-learning techniques. As semantic tags, we use lexical functions from the Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology. We explore the performance of two different machine-learning techniques, Nearest Neighbor Classification and Tree Augmented Bayesian Classification, testing them on a Spanish law corpus.