Noun Collocations Research Articles

Empowering autonomy in language learning: the sustainable impact of data-driven learning on noun collocation acquisition

Empowering autonomy in language learning: the sustainable impact of data-driven learning on noun collocation acquisition

The role of exposure condition, awareness and item type in developing implicit and explicit knowledge of collocational rules.

This study expands on previous SLA research by focusing on learning collocational rules. The study also explores the interaction between exposure conditions, awareness, and item-related variables in the context of collocation learning. Chinese learners of English were exposed to sentences from large corpora, featuring four target node verbs (replaced with pseudowords) and their respective noun collocates. There are two pairs of novel verbs with different L1-L2 congruencies in the experimental material. Participants were divided into incidental and intentional groups. The learning effectiveness was assessed through a plausibility judgment test (PJT), which included trained, new, and swapped items. Awareness of the underlying rules was measured using source attributions, retrospective verbal reports, and posttest thinking aloud. The results revealed that participants acquired both explicit and implicit knowledge of collocational rules. Rule-searching led to greater explicit knowledge but did not improve overall learning outcomes. Additionally, an interaction was observed among awareness, rule type, and test type. As the difficulty level increased in terms of L1-L2 congruency or item type, the importance of awareness in meeting the learning demands also increased.

What contributes to fluent L2 speech? Examining cognitive and utterance fluency link with underlying L2 collocational processing speed and accuracy

AbstractSecond language (L2) fluency research has suggested that a range of linguistic knowledge and processing speed serve as cognitive fluency (CF) underlying L2 utterance fluency (UF). Building on prior CF-UF link studies, this study explored L2 collocational processing speed and accuracy as underlying CF measures. This study also explored the phrasal frequency effect on the relationship between collocational processing speed and UF to test whether the processing speed of higher-frequency collocations is more strongly related to UF. A total of 108 Japanese university students completed a phrasal acceptability judgment task with adjective–noun collocations pooled from the Academic Collocation List. Speech was elicited in an argumentative speech task, and UF measures were computed based on speed, breakdown, and repair fluency. The results revealed that the collocational processing speed was weakly tied to articulation rate and mid-clause and end-clause silent pause ratio (rho = |.271–.322|), while the collocational processing accuracy was weakly to moderately tied to most UF measures except filled pause ratio (rho = |.281–.368|). The collocation frequency moderated the relationship between the processing speed and UF, suggesting that high-frequency collocations served as a proxy for automaticity in speech production. Implications for CF-UF link research are discussed.

A Contrastive Corpus-based Study of American and English Adjectives: ‘Important’ and ‘Significant’

This contrastive corpus-based study aims to analyze the similarities and differences of two synonyms “important” and “significant” concerning on the degree of formality in their distribution across genres as well as their collocations and semantic preference. The corpus data derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) which represent varieties of English usage across different cultures (American and British). This study analyzed the top 20 noun collocates with Mutual Information (MI) scores value of at least three. The corpus data from COCA and BNC explored some shared characteristics and contrastive features. The findings discovered that the two adjectives have the same core meaning and degree of formality since their highest frequency in academic texts whereas frequencies are the lowest in informal genres i.e. TV and movie subtitles and fiction. In certain conditions, these synonyms are different in terms of noun collocation due to the fact that these synonyms co-occur with particular noun collocates. Interestingly, the findings also confirm two adjectives are near synonyms as they share only two similar theme of semantic preference. In consequence, the two synonyms cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts. Moreover, it was found that the corpora provide some useful details that are deficient in the dictionary.

Contextual learning of L2 lexical and grammatical collocations with and without typographic enhancement

Multiple repetitions of collocations in second language (L2) reading produce gains in collocational knowledge. However, it is less clear how typographic enhancement affects the learning of different types of L2 collocations through reading. The present experiment investigated contextual learning of English lexical (verb + noun) and grammatical (preposition + noun) collocations by Chinese speakers over two days. We manipulated the learning conditions by bolding or not bolding multiple instances of the target collocations in reading texts. A cued-recall (gapfill) post-test was used to measure collocational knowledge. We observed greater accuracy of responses with grammatical (but not lexical) collocations when the collocations were bolded than when they were not bolded. We argue that bolding likely made prep + noun collocations more perceptually salient to the learners during reading. We conclude that contextual learning of L2 grammatical collocations is likely to benefit from drawing explicit attention to the whole expressions in written input.

Difficulties in Translating and Employing Word Collocation for Undergraduate Students at Al-Baha University

The point of the study is to assess the difficulties that Al-Baha University undergraduate students face in implementing word collocation. The study aims to demonstrate how collocation was used in translations by thirty Arabian bilingual undergraduates in a translation class, as well as to identify barriers to using collocation with participants translating text during the fall semester of the 2020–2021 academic years. The descriptive analytical method was used in this study. In this research, descriptive and analytical methodologies are used. The research utilized 20 Arabic sentence exams to outline the research topic, and the 30 second-tier degree students, currently studying English at Al-Baha University in Beljurshi, participated. According to the data, students failed to translate word collocations because they employed the word-for-word translation technique, not comprehending that any word paired with another results in a distinct meaning of the collocation, a lack of social and cultural information in the language, and an inadequate awareness of each other. This is due to the variety of meanings of the same term in a language other than the mother tongue. There are many meanings in English, making collocation translation difficult, and students' ignorance of the differences between Arabic and an English collocation is blamed for the difficulties in translating collocations. Collocations that were not covered by the study, such as countable noun collocations, sound collocations, and simile collocations, should be researched further.

Developing EFL Learners’ Collocational Knowledge in Self-Regulated Flipped Classroom: A Mixed-Methods Study

Abstract This study compares flipped approach with self-regulated flipped approach on EFL learners’ collocational knowledge. Thirty available EFL students were randomly assigned to two equal experimental groups: flipped and self-regulated flipped. For six weeks, both groups received learning contents outside of class time, and class time was used for interactive activities. However, self-regulating strategies (goal-setting and self-evaluation) were employed to the self-regulated flipped participants to help them schedule their out-of-class time to effectively work on the content before class to interact collaboratively with their peers and teachers in class activities. Three collocation videos were sent to their different WhatsApp groups. A researcher-made test on Adjective + Noun and Verb + Noun collocations served as the pre- and post-test. The time spent on watching collocations was collected through a ‘study log’. The results of a mixed between-within subjects analysis of variance revealed that integrating self-regulation into flipped approach enhanced the students’ collocational knowledge; their planning strategies and using study time also improved. The study has implications for EFL teachers and material developers.

ANALISIS TEKNIK PENERJEMAHAN KOLOKASI PADA NOVEL BAHASA JEPANG KOKORO KARYA NATSUME SOSEKI KE DALAM BAHASA INDONESIA

This study aims to determine the types of collocations and translation techniques used by translators in Natsume Soseki's translated novel titled Rahasia Hati, translated by Hartojo Andangdjaja. The translated novel was translated from the Japanese source text (ST) of the novel titled Kokoro. Language differences are a challenge for translators in translating. Likewise, phrases, one of which is a collocation phrase. Because all language's collocations are unique, translating them into their equivalents is extremely important. The approach taken to achieve this goal is with a qualitative descriptive method. Data obtained using documentation. Collocations are sought in ST's novel, Kokoro, based on Newmark's theory (1988). After collocations are found, the data is reduced or classified according to the theory. After being classified, the TSu collocation sample of the novel was analyzed by comparing it with its translated novel, Rahasia Hati, based on the theory of Molina and Albir (2002) to find the translation technique that the novel translator used. Of the 8 data that the authors found. From the reduction results obtained 1 noun + noun collocation, 6 noun + verb collocation, and 1 adjective + noun. While the translation technique found 6 data, namely generalization, compensation, amplification, modulation, literal translation, and description. The difference in collocation between Japanese and Indonesian is one of the challenges for Indonesian translators.
 Keywords: collocation, type of collocation, technique translation.

The effect of standardisation on collocations in Colombian and European Spanish translations of the work "Rootless"

The empirical study of syntactic, stylistic, and lexical patterns through corpora has frequently revealed a tendency towards standardisation, as Toury (1995/2012) defines it, in translated texts. In this vein, some studies have found that diatopy tends to become blurred in translations, particularly into transnational languages. In the case of Spanish, it has been stated that the enormous geographical richness of the language is not really reflected in translated Spanish. This paper argues that the translation of the work Rootless by Chris Howard into Colombian Spanish exhibits traits more typical of the European Spanish than of the Colombian Spanish variety. For this purpose, diatopic distribution of verb + noun (object) collocations extracted from a parallel corpus and a monolingual corpus of Rootless and its translations published in Colombian and European Spanish, is examined in a reference Spanish corpus.
 Keywords: parallel corpus; translated Spanish; Colombian Spanish; standardisation in translation; diatopic variation

A Corpus-based Analysis of Frequently Occurring Noun Collocations in Geographical Information System (GIS) Research Articles

A Corpus-based Analysis of Frequently Occurring Noun Collocations in Geographical Information System (GIS) Research Articles

Language Transfer in Chinese EFL Learners’ Receptive Vocabulary Knowledge of Delexical and Lexical Verb+Noun Collocations

Restricted verb+noun collocations in English comprise delexical verb+noun collocations and lexical verb+noun collocations. The former are combinations containing verbs with ‘light’ meaning, such as make a mistake, take pictures, and have dinner, while lexical verb+noun collocations refer to combinations with technical meaning or figurative sense, such as draw a conclusion and hold discussions. Many studies have shown that these collocations are challenging to non-native English speakers, but to what extent and why one type is more challenging than the other has not received much research attention. The current study focuses on Chinese EFL learners’ receptive knowledge of delexical and lexical verb+noun collocation, particularly in relation to the influence of their first language (L1). To address this, the study measured Chinese EFL learners’ receptive knowledge of delexical and lexical verb+noun collocations using COLLEX5 collocation test and the extent to which their responses in the test were congruent or incongruent with their L1, i.e., Mandarin. The results show that Chinese EFL learners’ receptive delexical verb+noun collocation knowledge is higher than their lexical ones. The results also show that 92.3% of delexical verb+noun collocation errors are congruent with Mandarin. L1 influence is also evident in lexical verb+noun collocation errors but to a lesser extent, i.e., 72.6%. These findings indicate that L1-influenced errors account for a significant portion of the errors, suggesting that EFL learners' L1 influences how L2 collocations are processed in the mental lexicon.

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.

Strategies in Translating Collocations in Political Texts: Case study of the Beirut Port Explosion 2020

: The present study examines the strategies used by Saudi undergraduate students when translating adjective plus noun collocations and verb plus object collocations in political texts from English into Arabic. An English proficiency test, along with a translation test, were conducted to evaluate the performance of the students. The translation test consisted of 10 English collocations selected from 53 random extracts from two online articles on the BBC and The Guardian websites, focusing on the Beirut port explosions in August 2020. The results show that the literal translation technique was highly dominant in translating both types of classification. This indicates that students encounter some obstacles when it comes to determining the correct equivalents in Arabic. However, the data show that sometimes literal translation can sometimes be adequate in translating the political collocations in both types. The data also reveal that a synonymy strategy was adopted more frequently in translating the verb + object than the noun + adjective. This is mainly because the frequency of (un)restrictedness of collocation errors may be limited in political texts because the structure of political texts is different from that of other texts, in the sense that it has a limited number of culture-specific collocations that are frequently translated, and therefore an equivalent can easily be found in the target language.

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.

The Role of Congruency in Collocation Acquisition: A Case Study of Vietnamese Students Learning English Adjective + Noun Collocations

Collocational competence is of critical importance to EFL learners’ language proficiency. Due to limited research on L1 influence on L2 learners’ development of receptive and productive knowledge of adjective + noun collocations, especially in the context of Vietnam, this study is an attempt to address these gaps by investigating whether Vietnamese learners could recognize and use congruent English adjective + noun collocations more accurately than incongruent ones. Data were collected from 72 English-major undergraduates in a Vietnamese university who completed three collocational tests: the Receptive Knowledge Test, the Productive Knowledge Test, and the paragraph-writing test. Results showed that, in contrast to language transfer theory, congruent collocations posed considerably more problems for the students in identifying the well-formed lexical combinations and using them accurately in writing. These findings highlight the importance of explicitly teaching congruent and incongruent collocations in EFL classrooms.

Sufficient or adequate evidence? Using corpus data to distinguish between near-synonymous adjectives in academic prose

Using the British Academic Written English Corpus as data, this study attempts to reveal the semantic and usage differences between adequate and sufficient, two near-synonymous adjectives often used in academic texts. The distributional patterns examined include overall and discipline frequency, syntactic functions, typical noun collocates and modifying adverbs. The results show a preference for sufficient in academic prose, where it is distinguished from adequate by a more frequent predicative use; an inclination towards it-extraposed constructions, and the VPto and pp_for patterns; the tendency to express more absolute and more specialized meanings; and a close collocational relationship with nouns relating to information. Adequate, which is less frequent, tends to more often modify abstract nouns and co-occur with the definite uses of its modifiees, and its uses may involve comparison. Insights from the study can support scholars in their lexical choices in English academic writing.

Profiling a microeconomics noun collocation list: A corpus-based approach

Collocations are essential for language learning because using collocations naturally and accurately constitutes a key indicator of academic writing success. Past studies have examined collocations in academic genres and created lists of collocations for pedagogical use. However, studies that compile collocation lists often use a wide-angle approach to identify general collocations. There have been concerns about using general academic multiword constructions (MWCs) in English for specific purposes (ESP) courses as there are formalities and conventions in academic texts which are characterised by discipline-specific MWCs. This corpus-based study proposes a common and pedagogically useful microeconomics noun collocation list (MNCL). The MNCL is based on a corpus of microeconomics research articles comprising 1.6 million words. The MNCL is the result of an innovative procedure that involves a four-step selection method. This study produces: (1) a list of the 1 125 most common noun collocations (noun + noun, noun + verb, verb + noun, adjective + noun) in microeconomics research articles identified and classified using the most commonly used nouns, and (2) new findings regarding the types of noun collocations. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications on how collocations should be perceived and approached in ESP classrooms.

Is it ‘Increase’ or ‘Rise?’ A Corpus-based Behavioural Profile Study of English Near-Synonym Verbs

This study emerged as a result of insufficient knowledge and descriptions of the behavioural profiles of the near-synonym English verbs, increase and rise, by non-corpus-based traditional reference sources used by students. We explored the behavioural characteristics of this group of near-synonym verbs using the British National Corpus (BNC) of 100 million words as our corpus. Using the Sketch Engine Tool, we examined their frequency, subject and object noun collocations, adverb collocations, and syntactic behavioural profiles. The results demonstrate that both words collocate with subject and object nouns. However, on their top ten subject collocation lists, increase only collocates with abstract nouns related to finance and economy, whereas rise collocates with three different kinds of abstract nouns related to finance/economy, the human entity, and the natural environment, and one concrete noun related to natural environment. In addition, they only have two collocates in common on their top subject noun collocates list. In terms of object noun collocations, increase only collocates with abstract nouns connected to finance/economy and the natural environment, but rise collocates with abstract and concrete nouns on their top list. They also only have three adverb collocations in common on the top list. Rise has 17 distinct syntactic patterns, whereas increase has 15 different syntactic patterns. In teaching near-synonyms, we propose using corpus-based reference resources.

Primary, Main, and Major: Learning the Synonyms through Corpus Data

English is widely known as a language containing a number of near-synonyms, i.e. words with similar meaning, and therefore English learners are often confronted with difficulty in the use of near-synonyms in different contexts. This corpus-informed study aims to differentiate the synonyms primary, main , and major , focusing on their distribution across genres and collocation usage. The three target synonyms were selected as main and majo r are among the first 1,000 words in spoken and written English (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2014), while primary appears in Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL). The data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) demonstrated that the three synonymous adjectives most frequently occur in academic texts, with primary being more common in newspapers and magazines. Through a collocation analysis based on frequency and MI score, concern strongly collocates with all three adjectives, while some noun collocates are frequently combined with only certain pairs of synonyms, e.g. primary/main focus , a main/major theme , and a primary/major factor . More interestingly, some noun collocates are attached to specific semantic themes, with primary being exclusively associated with health and election, main with place, food, or literature, and major with sports or business. As to the implications for ELT, teachers are encouraged to develop synonym lessons based on typical collocates derived from authentic corpus-based English, e.g. COCA.

Generalizing Knowledge of Second Language Collocations: The Roles of Within‐ and Cross‐Language Similarity on Acceptability and Event‐Related Potentials

AbstractRecent research has shown that knowledge of second language (L2) collocations is important to learners for improving their language processing and production but also that acquiring L2‐specific collocations is a very burdensome task for learners. Thus, bootstrapping knowledge of L2 collocations through generalization is highly desirable, but this area has received surprisingly limited attention. This study examined L2 learners’ ability to generalize knowledge of recently learned verb–noun collocations during processing and whether this type of learning occurred via intralexical associations in the L2 (similarity) or was facilitated by known collocations in learners’ first language (L1). Mixed‐effects regression targeting measures of learners’ brain event‐related potentials revealed cross‐language influence during real‐time processing that preceded learners’ acceptability judgments. Both within‐ and cross‐language similarity influenced learners’ behavioral judgments. These findings revealed cross‐language integration in L1–L2 incongruent collocations from the earliest moments of processing.