Collocational Patterns Research Articles

Autistic Regression and Exposure to Industrial Chemicals: Preliminary Observations.

Exposure to industrial pollutants is a potential risk factor not fully explored in ASD with regression (ASD+R). We studied geographical collocation patterns of industrial air chemical emissions and the location of homes of children with ASD+R at different exposure times, compared with ASD cases without regression (ASD-R). Fifteen of 111 emitted chemicals collocated with ASD+R, and 65 with ASD-R. ASD+R collocated more strongly with different neurotoxicants/immunotoxicants a year before diagnosis, whereas ASD-R were moderately collocated with chemicals across all exposure periods. This preliminary exploratory analysis of differences in exposure patterns raises a question regarding potential pathophysiological differences between the conditions.

Distinguishing Semantic Preference Of Hurry And Rush Via Collocational Patterns: A Corpus-Based Study

Verbs are the action words that describe what the subject is doing. Many verbs are synonymous, namely, they could convey very similar meanings, such as the verbs hurry and rush, which roughly convey ‘speeded actions’. This paper presents a corpus linguistic study of the semantic preferences of hurry and rush in terms of the nouns that co-occur (i.e., collocate) with them. The noun collocations data, and their degree of association with the verbs, were extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English focusing on collocates appearing within a two-words window to the right (i.e., after) and to the left of (i.e., before) hurry and rush. These collocates were further analyzed semantically for (i) their semantic fields using the Concepticon catalogue (List et al. 2023) and (ii) their broader noun types (Wren 2021). Overall, we found that hurry and rush exhibit distinct collocational patterns and semantic preferences, particularly in terms of the preferred semantic fields (e.g., KINSHIP, RELIGION AND BELIEF, EMOTION AND VALUE are semantic fields preferred for the left-side collocates of hurry while rush is associated with THE BODY and SOCIAL AND POLITICAL RELATIONS). This study shows that synonymous verbs can have distinct semantic patterns.

Metaphorical polysemy of the Chinese color term hēi 黑 “black”

Abstract This paper reports a corpus-based, cognitive semantic study on profiling the varied uses of the Chinese color term hēi 黑 “black” with regard to its metaphorical polysemy. We hypothesize that the semantic (dis)similarities among the eight metaphorical meanings of hēi “black” can be captured by clustering their contextual features, including collocational patterns, morphosyntactic and semantic properties, and discourse information. The Behavioral Profiles approach is adopted for the analyses with the annotations of 800 instances for 46 contextual features and a hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis conducted on the annotated data. The results show that the eight metaphorical senses of hēi “black” fall into three clusters. This clustering can be explained by the conceptual bases pertaining to color perceptions and color changes, in line with Conceptual Metaphor Theory. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the corpus-based Behavioral Profiles approach in exploring the underlying cognitive mechanisms of metaphorical extensions and meaning differentiations.

Collocational Pattern of Adjectives in The Lexical Field of Beauty : A Corpus-Based Study

This study investigated the usage differences and similarities of adjectives namely beautiful, pretty, and gorgeous through collocational patterns of nouns they modify in the [adjective + noun] construction (Benson, Benson, and Ilson 1986). The collocational patterns were analysed in terms of the semantic field categories using the Concepticon catalogue and of the noun types of the collocates using theory by (Wren and Martin 2000). The data sources were taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the analyses adopted the mix-method approach. In terms of their frequencies, beautiful is the most frequent (hence more common) than pretty and gorgeous. beautiful conveys a meaning of aesthetically pleasing, feelings, or thoughts. The highest semantic field categories for the collocate types of beautiful were “Basic action and Technology” and “Speech and Language”. pretty produced more varied noun collocation than beautiful. pretty conveys meaning of fine looking without being truly beautiful or handsome. “Emotions and Values” and “Possession” were the highest semantic categories of collocates for pretty. Finally, gorgeous attaches more to something that is extremely stunning. The category “Kinship” was very dominant for gorgeous. To conclude, collocational pattern and semantic field can expose the different usage of the three semantically similar adjectives.

Delicious angst and tooth-rotting fluff: Distant reading community discourses of emotion in Harry Potter fanfiction comments

This article employs distant reading to examine discursive norms for expressing emotion in comments on Harry Potter fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3). Using text analysis tools to identify collocational patterns, the article shows how fanfiction engages this community and how community members express their engagement in accordance with community discourses. The analysis transcends the level of individual utterances by examining large-scale patterns in the data. Comparing comments for three fanfiction genres (angst, fluff and hurt/comfort) reveals three patterns. First, commenters frequently describe stories about suffering in positive terms. Second, metaphors likening fanfiction consumption to food consumption are prevalent in all genres. Commenters also use language blending physical and emotional sensations. Finally, commenters describe stories about positive emotions using negative metaphors of rot, decay, gluttony or overload. This use of positive or negative language need not indicate positive or negative judgements but instead reveals discursive fields to which fanfiction reading is linked. Additionally, comments indicate that fanfiction is used to influence emotional states. These findings contribute to an understanding of the impact of fanfiction within its community and raise questions regarding the role of emotion in fanfiction reading.

The Intervention of Indonesian Students’ Culture in Translating Into English Collocation: A Case Study at Universitas Muhammadiyah Luwuk Banggai

Once Indonesian students translate collocation into English, they remain under their culture and language system. This qualitative research intends to identify Indonesian collocation that translated inappropriately into English and explain how their Indonesian culture intervene in translation. A list of some sentences containing Indonesian collocation was translated into English by the students. The differences lies in the way the lexical choice of collocation is inappropriate. Both of Indonesian and English dictionaries were used to reflect meaning transparency, commutability, and the patterns. This research found that 33 data were inappropriate. Students translated those literally as their culture and the common way of thinking, and prefer to their own collocation patterns. Those sound fairly familiar to Indonesian students. They did not recognize meaning and culture of target language. The research findings offer valuable insight on undergoing foreign language learning as a part of understanding other cultures.

The functional spectrum of the Turkish pragmatic marker Ya

The corpus-driven study explores the functional spectrum of the Turkish pragmatic marker ya. Including functional, syntactic and collocational discussions, it reveals that ya often functions in the interpersonal domain, reflecting the speaker's usually negative affective stance. The study indicates that ya acts as a reminder of shared knowledge to avoid communication glitches. In the textual/sequential domain, ya is used as a topic initiator, shifter and expander. Its longer form, yaa has an idiosyncratic summative function, signalling topic termination after the speaker has satisfactorily enlightened an issue. At the utterance-medial position, ya marks the preceding segment as a reason clause, often reflecting unfavourable attitudes. In appeal intonation, ya sounds like a marker of hastener for requests to negotiate desired actions. As an emotional response token it reflects negative attitudes like annoyance, dismay, impatience or disbelief. Marginally, ya is an assertive marker allied to condemnatory wh-questions to criticise someone or functions as a tag question for negative anchors. It was also found that ya forms several collocation patterns that disambiguate some pragmatic functions.

Exploring color metaphor with Behavioral Profiles: A usage-based analysis on the metaphorical meanings of the Chinese color term bái “white”

This paper conducts a usage-based, cognitive-semantic study on semantic relations between the twelve metaphorical meanings of the Chinese color term, bái 白 “white”, with the Behavioral Profiles approach. The contextual variations of the twelve metaphorical meanings of bái are captured by 51 contextual features, including collocational patterns, morphosyntactic and semantic properties, and discourse information. With a dataset consisting of 1200 instances, two statistical methods are adopted to explore the semantic relations of these meanings, namely Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering and Multiple Correspondence Analysis. The results show that the twelve metaphorical senses of bái fall into four clusters, and their semantic relations can be empirically distinguished based on the proposed contextual features. Furthermore, we found that the identified semantic relations can be explained by mutually related conceptual metaphors based on the perceptual experiences of the white color regarding its three perceptual properties – absence of hue, highest brightness, and zero colorfulness. The present study ultimately demonstrates how the semantic relations among the twelve metaphorical meanings of bái can be empirically distinguished based on their linguistic encodings and explained by cognitive principles in line with the Conceptual Metaphor Theory.

'Climate change concerns human survival…and justice in our international community': A corpus-based positive discourse analysis (PDA) of the largest developing nation's global involve/engagement discourses (re)told in interpreting.

Contributing to a much-needed 'outward turn' in interpreting studies, this intervention examines the role of interpreting and interpreters in (re)articulating the welcome 'voice' of a developing nation in the global South. Against the backdrop of reform and opening-up (ROU), China, the world's largest developing country, is increasingly open and keen to engage globally. Such elements as openness, integration, and international engagement represent vital components of the overarching ROU metadiscourse that justifies China's sociopolitical system and multifarious policies and decisions. As part of a series of digital humanities (DH) informed empirical studies exploring the part played by interpreting in rendering China's ROU metadiscourse, this study zooms in on the government interpreters' mediation of Beijing's international engagement and global involvement discourses. Unlike CDA which often foregrounds the negative themes (e.g. injustice, oppression, dominance, and hegemony), an innovative corpus-based positive discourse analysis (PDA) is introduced and applied, drawing on 20 years of China's press conferences. This article points to the interpreters' visibility and agency in facilitating and strengthening China's discourse through (over)producing core lexical items and salient collocational patterns. Following the trends of interdisciplinarity and digital humanities, this corpus-based PDA study illustrates ultimately how a major non-Western developing country from the global South communicates its discourse bilingually in front of the international community. The potential impact and implications of the interpreter-in(tro)duced discursive changes are discussed vis-à-vis the ever shifting and delicate East-West power balance from the perspective of (geo)politics.

Institutional translators’ mediation of CPC Work Reports diachronically through personal pronouns: a corpus-based discourse analysis approach

ABSTRACT Drawing on a corpus-based discourse analysis approach, this paper presents a diachronic-cum-contrastive study of institutional translators’ mediation of Chinese political discourse through personal pronouns and their collocations with modal verbs, with a view to identifying how interpersonal relations and power distance are diachronically mediated between the author and the readers when recontextualized. The corpus comprises six Work Reports of the Communist Party of China and their corresponding English translations from the 1990s to the 2010s. Textual analysis reveals that there has been a diachronically shifting trend across the six TTs towards constructing a closer and more symmetrical relationship with the target readers vis-à-vis the STs by manipulating personal pronouns. Moreover, the prevalent collocational patterns of ‘we’ with modal verbs tend to shift from encoding obligation in the earlier TTs to emphasizing inclination in more recent TTs. Further critical analysis of the metadiscourse of China’s institutional translation of political discourse suggests that such shifts over time have been motivated by a major ideological evolution in the Chinese political context and the changing target readership. Our findings suggest that a corpus-based diachronic perspective on translation may unveil subtle, patterned variations in minor linguistic signs that provide important clues to broader contextual transformations.

Multilingual pragmatic markers in South African English

This article provides a descriptive account of five multilingual pragmatic markers – nje, mara, kanti, vele and kaloku – which are borrowed from indigenous South African languages into South African English, with a view to investigating their frequencies, spelling stability, syntactic positioning, distribution across text types, collocational patterns and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are extracted from the South African component of the Global Web-based English corpus, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic perspective. The results show that the multilingual pragmatic markers are generally infrequent compared to their English counterparts, their spellings are generally stable and their positions in the utterances are based on their functions. The article identifies nje as an attitudinal marker, a focus particle, an emphasis marker, an intensifier and a marker of shared knowledge, mara as a contrastive marker and kanti as a contrastive marker, an inferential marker and an emphasis marker. Vele is an emphasis marker, while kaloku is an attention marker, a topic orientation marker and an inferential marker. In conclusion, these multilingual pragmatic markers contribute to the distinctive nature of South African English at the pragmatic level.

CORPUS TECHNOLOGIES IN TEACHING ACADEMIC WRITING

There have been a lot of investigations in the sphere of Corpus Linguistics and Corpus-based Language pedagogy which have revealed the insights and methodologies of corpus linguistics to second language writing pedagogy and research. However, there are still gaps referring to the empirical application of corpus tools in teaching writing. The following article is aimed to examine the effects of corpus tools application in writing classes, in particular the how corpus technologies can be incorporated into writing instruction. The research has involved qualitative and quantitative methods of investigation, as well as some surveys and interviews. The results of the research have shown that corpora can be used as a meaningful and authentic reference for language materials which provide learners with real usage of words and collocation patterns. More importantly, the integration of corpus into the writing classroom appears to provide the solution to the writing problems of learners and also promote their independent learning skills. Besides, the study focuses on the necessity to increase the learners’ willingness and success in using corpora. The findings also suggest that teachers, before incorporating corpus-based teaching into their instruction, need to understand the basic principles of the usage of corpus technologies and how these technologies can be effectively integrated into the writing instruction.

More Examples May Benefit Dictionary Users

Abstract There is no doubt that example sentences enhance a dictionary’s value by providing dictionary users with the typical context of words. But how many examples do dictionary users need in a dictionary, or how many examples in a dictionary lead to confusion? The aim of the paper is twofold. First, an attempt will be made to investigate the usefulness of encoding examples in language production. Second, the aim will be to see whether a multitude of encoding examples exhibiting various types of syntax and collocation patterns confuse or benefit students of English during a translation task. 213 Polish learners of English participated in the study. To achieve the aims of the present study, mixed-effects logistic models were fitted and analyzed for the purpose of statistical analysis. The findings of the current study suggest that the presence of encoding examples in dictionaries is beneficial to learners of English in language production. Also, it can be inferred from the data that exposure to eight examples exhibiting two target syntax/collocation patterns of use is equally helpful to dictionary users as the availability of three examples exhibiting a single target syntax/collocation pattern.

Collocational Patterns of the Synonyms Join, Participate, and Attend: A Corpus-Based Study

Collocational Patterns of the Synonyms Join, Participate, and Attend: A Corpus-Based Study

Sand-fixing effect and compound change of nylon checkerboard sand barrier.

Grid-based sand-fixing protection barriers have been widely used to solve linear engineering problems in sandy areas. Their placement directly affects the combined change law of wind speed weakening and sand sediment in the sand barrier. It also affects the cost of sand control and the selected structure of the protection system. Therefore, quantifying the effect of different sand barriers is important. We installed nylon mesh checkerboard sand-fixing barriers of three heights and three sizes on the windward side of the highway in the Ulanbuhe Desert, China. By using anemometer and sand collecting instrument, through comparing and observing air flow changes, windproof efficiency, and sand sediment inside the sand barrier, it is found that height had more influence on the protective benefit of a sand barrier than did the mesh specification. The protective effect at the boundary of a sand barrier resulted from compound superposition. The model for calculating a suitable sand barrier protection width was affected by sand-driving wind speed, open field wind speed, sand barrier unit side length, height, and actual protection demand. Sand barriers of 1 × 1m (It is the grid size of the mesh.) at 20-cm height, 1 × 1m and 1.5 × 1.5-m at 30-cm height could be laid over a wide area. Different collocation patterns can be selected according to the dominant wind direction. The results can provide basic data and theoretical support for sand barrier protection system.

A Study of Adjective-Noun Collocations in Chinese English

This study explores the collocational patterns of ten high-frequency adjectives in the Written Corpus of China English (abbreviated to WCCE) with a focus on its collocations with nouns. A corpus-based comparative methodology was adopted to investigate the differences between China English and British English in the use of adjective and noun collocational patterns. The major findings of the study can be stated as follows: 1) Some collocational structures only occur in the Chinese context, such as economic rebalancing, economic belt, and international airspace. 2) Some collocational structures, like economic corridor, economic construction, new energy, are used more frequently in China English than in British English. 3) The frequencies of some collocational structures in BNC are much greater than those in WCCE, in particular, Old Testament, local election. The reasons for these different uses of collocational structures with distinct Chinese features might include (but not limited to), i. the development of China’s economy (e.g. economic belt, economic corridor); ii. the differences between China and Britain in politics and society (e.g. Old Testament, local election); iii. the influence of the development of science (e.g. new energy); iv. linguistic transfer (e.g. old Yao, economic take-off). The findings show that China English has its distinctive collocational patterns which may suggest that English used in China has undergone a process of nativization.

Borrowed Swahili discourse-pragmatic features in Kenyan and Tanzanian Englishes

Abstract This study explores five Swahili discourse-pragmatic features – ati/eti, yaani, pole, sasa and sawa – which are borrowed from Swahili into Kenyan and Tanzanian Englishes, with a view to investigating their meanings, frequencies, positioning, collocational patterns, syntactic distribution and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are extracted from the International Corpus of English-East Africa and the Kenyan and Tanzanian components of the corpus of Global Web-based English, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, from a variational and postcolonial corpus pragmatic framework. The study reveals that the Swahili discourse-pragmatic features occur more frequently in the Kenyan corpora than in the Tanzanian corpora, except in the case of sasa, which occurred with the same frequency in the online corpus. The paper identifies ati/eti as an attention marker, a quotative marker, a hearsay marker, an inferential marker, and an emotive interjection, yaani as an emphasis and elaborative marker, while pole is an attitudinal marker that expresses sympathy and sarcasm. While sasa is only an attention marker, sawa is an agreement and attention marker. The paper shows that these borrowed discourse-pragmatic features contribute to the distinctive nature of East African Englishes.

Analysis of Sait Faik’s story named Tüneldeki Çocuk with a text-focused approach

Çalışmanın dayanaklarından göstergebilim, anlatı metinlerinin yapısını oluşturan bileşenleri ortaya koyarak onların yapılandırılma biçimlerini inceleyen bir çözümleme yaklaşımdır. Metinleri yapılandıran anlamsal ve söylemsel düzlemleri belirleyerek anlatının yapısını farklı boyutlarda ortaya çıkarmayı sağlar. Metindilbilim ise dilbilimin tümce üstü yapılara odaklanmasıyla gelişerek, metinlerin yapılarını, içerik ve dil bilgisi açısından nasıl kurgulandıklarını ortaya çıkarır ve bunları uygulamalı biçimde açıklar. Metin oluşturmanın genel koşullarını betimleyen metindilbilim, metin olanı metin olmayandan ayırır. Bu çalışmada Cumhuriyet Dönemi Türk yazınının kısa öyküleriyle tanınan yazarlarından Sait Faik Abasıyanık’ın Tüneldeki Çocuk adlı öyküsünün göstergebilim ve metindilbilimin imkânlarını birlikte kullanarak çözümlenmesi amaçlanmıştır. Bunun için nitel araştırma deseninde yürütülen bu çalışmada doküman analizi yöntemi kullanılarak metnin yapısına dair nitel veriler elde edilmiştir. Göstergebilimsel çözümleme basamaklarına göre metin bölümlere ve söylem kesitlerine ayrılmış, anlatının genel düzenlenişi ortaya konulmuştur. Ardından Greimas’ın eyleyenler örnekçesi çerçevesinde eyleyenler saptanarak bunlar arasındaki ilişkileri kuran eksenler belirlenmiş, anlatı izlencesini oluşturan süreçler ve kiplikler gösterilmiştir. Ardından figüratif karşıtlıklar saptanmış, uzam ve betimleme, zaman kullanımı, bakış açısı ve izleksel roller ortaya konmuştur. Diğer yandan bu başlıklar altında öyküdeki eşdizimsel örüntüleme görünümleri belirlenmiştir. İzleksel roller ve bakış açısının belirlenmesinde gönderim unsurlarının tespitinden yararlanılmıştır. Bu sayede metnin çok katmanlı yapısı iki ayrı çözümleme yaklaşımının katkılarıyla ortaya konmuştur. Buna göre incelenen anlatısal metinlerin yapısını ortaya çıkarmak için hem göstergebilimin hem metindilbilimin imkânlarından olabildiğince yararlanılmasının gerekliliği vurgulanmıştır.

A Corpus-Based Study of English Adjectives: ‘Wondrous’, ‘Prodigious’ and ‘Stupendous’ in BNC

The present study focuses on the frequency, collocations, noun modification, and semantic similarities and differences of three English adjectives: wondrous, prodigious, and stupendous to compare and contrast the similarities and differences in terms of meaning and collocation. The data was collected from Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and The British National Corpus. The three adjectives were found to have the same fundamental meaning but differ in terms of specific meanings, degrees of formality, noun modification, and collocational patterns. Consequently, the three Adjectives cannot be used interchangeably in all situations. In addition, it was found that the corpus provides some additional data which is non-existent in the dictionary.

Acehnese lexical and grammatical collocations of the North Aceh dialect

This research dealt with collocations used in the North Aceh dialect. It analyzed the part of speech categories into which collocations of the North Aceh dialect can be grouped. This research focused on the grammatical collocations and lexical collocations used in the Blang Mee village of Bireuen District, Aceh, Indonesia. This is a descriptive qualitative using case study looking into the villagers’ use of Acehnese collocations. Six Acehnese speakers were selected as the language informants. They were fifty years old or above and never traveled or lived outside of Blang Mee. Data were extracted from interviews with these speakers who were asked to discuss general topics in Acehnese. The analysis was performed using a framework on collocation categories by Benson et al. The results of the analysis showed both lexical and grammatical collocations used by speakers in North Aceh. Lexical collocations were found in the forms of verb (denoting creation or activation) + noun combinations, verb (meaning eradication or nullification) + a noun, adjective + noun combinations, noun + verb combinations, noun + noun combinations, adverb + adjective combinations, and verb + adverb combinations. Grammatical collocations came in the following combinations: noun + preposition combinations, adjective + preposition combinations, preposition + noun combinations, and collocational verb patterns. The collocations used by the North Aceh dialect speakers indicate the uniqueness of their dialect within other dialects spoken by the Acehnese.