Collocational Patterns Research Articles

Foreign Languages and Aesopianisation: When the Popularity of Fables Unlocks Spanish

Purpose. This article explores the concept of the ‘Aesopianisation’ of other languages, focusing on the idea of using Aesop’s fables as a language learning aid. The fable of “The Fox and the Grapes” serves as an example of the widespread popularity of Aesop's timeless stories, making them an ideal resource to unlock related languages, such as Spanish. Methodology. The integration of beloved fables into reading comprehension and classroom discussion captivates students' imaginations and may help to solve one of the most daunting challenges in education: mastering analytical reading. Employing content analysis, this article delves into the application of narrative popularity effect (NPE) (1), linguistic context predictability (LCP) (2), lexical interlingual cognates (LIC) (3), and collocational patterns (CP) (4) as four useful linguistic tools to solve one of the most daunting educational challenges: unlocking a foreign language through detailed analytical reading. Results. The findings reveal a remarkable ability of these tools to extract the lexicon and structures from ten selected popular fables in Spanish, underscoring the potential efficacy of this approach in language learning. Conclusions. The study suggests that combining linguistic and cultural awareness can be a powerful tool for learning foreign languages, demonstrating that the ‘Aesopianisation’ of a language is indeed possible.

Gender characterization in Lady Windermere’s Fan and its Chinese translations: A corpus stylistic approach

This study examines gender representation in Oscar Wilde’s comedy and satire, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), using corpus stylistic analysis. Specifically, it analyzes gender characterization patterns in the original drama and explores how these patterns shift in two Chinese translations: Shen Xingren’s translation in 1918 and Hong Shen’s translation in 1923. By analyzing keyword patterns, collocational patterns, and characterization cues, the study reveals the intricate nature of gender characterization in the source text. Subsequently, a comparison is made between the textual patterns of the source text and their manifestations in the translations. The findings indicate that while Shen Xingren’s translation quite faithfully (re)represents the gender images and relations of the source text, Hong Shen’s selective appropriation of women and men characterization in his translation not only suppresses the source text’s potential to challenge moral absolutism towards women but also undermines the voices of women present in the original text. The article suggests that the re-representation or shifts in gender characterization observed between the source and target texts can be attributed to the translator’s ideology and adherence to particular poetics.

Difficulties Faced by Second Language Learners in Using Collocation

This paper reviews the challenges encountered by second language learners in the acquisition and utilization of collocations, which are crucial aspects of proficient language use. Collocations refer to the habitual pairing or grouping of words that occur together frequently in natural language. The research synthesizes findings from various studies conducted in the field, highlighting common difficulties experienced by learners across different proficiency levels and linguistic backgrounds. Key factors contributing to these challenges include differences in first language structures, inadequate exposure to authentic language use, limited awareness of collocational patterns, and difficulties in achieving native-like fluency. Additionally, pedagogical implications and effective instructional strategies for enhancing collocational competence are discussed, is to inform language instructors and curriculum developers in building more targeted and effective language learning materials and activities.This research is divided into three sections; section one presents the preliminaries of the study. Section two explains the meaning, types, characteristics, and importance of the study. Section three will apply a test of collocation on the 4th stage of the college to know their weakness points in collocation. Finally, the conclusion is the research.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of American News Reports on the Opening Ceremony of Beijing Winter Olympics

The opening ceremony of Beijing Winter Olympic Games in 2022 has been extensively covered in international news reports. Although these news reports seem impartial and objective, they carry underlying ideologies that can influence public opinions and judgments. This paper examined the discursive representation of China in American news reports on the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis model as the theoretical basis. News stories from American media were collected and analysed in terms of headline, collocation, and quotation pattern. The research found that American news reports present mixed and multifaceted views toward the host country. They showed appreciation for the host country’s success in delivering a spectacular opening ceremony, but they tended to frame China negatively, portraying it as an intimidating power and a geopolitical threat. This study can improve our understanding of the discursive practice of news reports and enhance critical awareness in interpreting news texts.

English Verbs of Directional Vision:Compatibility with Designations of a Qualitative Attribute

This article addresses the challenges of constructing a semantic model of verbs related to the concept of ‘directed vision process and its qualitative attribute’ based on English collocations. The authors examine the structure of meaning of these lexical items through the analysis of the collocational patterns of look, watch, glance, stare, and gaze. This classification can be seen as a step towards creating a typological semasiology of specific languages. The structure of the complex lexical meaning ‘directed vision process and its attribute’ can be broken down into the following components: the invariant meaning, i.e., the core sememe (directed vision process), and an additional semantic component, i.e., the subordinate sememe (qualitative attribute of the vision process). A comprehensive sample was taken from 8000 pages of text from 24 works of fiction, describing 927 collocations. The first group includes collocations expressing various negative emotions associated with directed vision process: bad mood, nervousness, distrust, unfriendliness, fear, hatred, contempt, cruelty, etc. The second group consists of collocations expressing attentiveness, steadfastness, surprise, curiosity, wonder in characterizing directed gaze. The third group combines collocations expressing activity, speed, brevity, stealth of a brief glance. The authors came to the conclusion that all vision lexemes, except the verb ‘to look’, have a complex meaning structure.

Pidgin English proverbs as a source of structural nativization in Nigerian English

AbstractIn this paper, we explore the role of Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) proverbs in language contact settings and their impact on the development of idiomatic phraseology in Nigerian English (NgE). In a set of 100 NPE proverbs, we identified lexical keywords that served as anchors for searches in the large‐scale Nairaland corpus to detect recurrent collocational patterns that in further proximity searches yielded frequent, lexico‐grammatically variable patterns that may be interpreted as innovations at the early stages of idiom formation. The findings suggest that cognitively motivated key lexical items of NPE proverbs may serve as a basis for the formation of variable but also lexico‐grammatically more condensed idiomatic expressions in NgE.

The approximators about, at least and nearly as interpersonal devices in nineteenth-century women’s instructive texts

This paper aims at describing how about, at least and nearly are used in the nineteenth-century subcorpus of the Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English, which gathers instructional texts exclusively written by women. While still retaining their approximative sense, about, at least and nearly have a large potential to build and maintain writer-reader interpersonal relationships. The most frequent collocational patterns have been firstly identified by using corpus tools to later analyse the major pragmatic functions of specific examples following Zhang’s (2015) framework for elastic language. Findings reveal that collocations with numerical expressions are common to about, at least and nearly while other patterns only emerge with about and nearly. It also seems that pattern and function are tightly interwoven. In general, the approximators surveyed here fulfill a variety of interpersonal functions, most notably, just-right elastic, rapport elastic, mitigating elastic, self-protection elastic, and intensifying elastic.

Discourse-Pragmatic Borrowing in South African English

This paper explores five borrowed discourse-pragmatic features—wena, mna/mina, yazi, phela, and ke—which are transferred from indigenous South African languages into South African English, with the objective of investigating their frequency, position, collocational patterns, and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are taken from the South African component of the Global Web-based English corpus, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic framework. The results show that the discourse-pragmatic features are generally infrequent, orthographically stable, and prefer the clause-initial position. The paper indicates that wena is used as an address term to call for the addressee’s attention, mna/mina is used to emphasise personal identity, while yazi seeks confirmation of and signals shared knowledge. Phela is an emphasis marker, while ke indicates contrast, textual coherence, and emphasis. This study underscores the contributions of indigenous South African languages to the discourse-pragmatic features of South African English.

PRINCIPLES OF COMPILING A GERMAN-UKRAINIAN DICTIONARY OF PARONYMS

This article addresses the principles of selecting paronyms and the methodology for compiling an electronic German-Ukrainian dictionary of paronyms using a corpus-based approach and systematic analysis to identify similarities and differences in the use of paronyms in speech. The author presents a concept of paronymy as a systemic phenomenon involving etymologically related words with similar morphemic structures but different meanings. By conducting a comparative analysis of collocations, the study identified 1,836 paronyms organized into paronymic series, each comprising two to nine components. The article examines existing dictionaries of paronyms and highlights their lexicographic shortcomings, such as excessive normative/prescriptive orientation, inadequate development of dictionary entries from both linguistic and didactic perspectives, and a lack of rigorous evaluations of modern data to inform dictionary compilation. The ideal paronym dictionary should rely on corpus data, providing reliable information with generalizations about individual word uses within conventionalized language usage. Corpus-based tools, such as those used for contrasting near-synonyms, systematically identify similarities and differences between paronyms in a contrastive manner. This process determines the degree of semantic closeness among expressions with similar contextual usage by comparing their immediate collocational patterns. The recorded semantic closeness or distance between paronyms is based on their contextual overlap in usage. The lexicographic processing of the selected paronyms was carried out with TshwaneLex, a computer-based dictionary creation software that allows lexicographers to develop dictionaries for any language without requiring advanced IT skills. TshwaneLex offers various features such as automatic cross-reference tracking, advanced dictionary comparison/merge functionality, and support for all world languages through full Unicode compatibility. The lemma editing process uses a tree-based interface to represent the hierarchical structure of the lemma, including different meanings, submeanings, word formations, multi-word units, examples of usage, cross-references, and more. Furthermore, the input/output architecture is designed to support the development of additional interfaces for various data sources as add-ons or plug-ins, facilitating other output formats. The article notes that a PHP-based software module is currently available for hosting the TshwaneLex dictionary on the internet, providing an accessible platform for electronic dictionary publication.

How to Improve an Enterprise’s Innovation Capability from the Perspective of High- and Low-Level Enterprises Using Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis

An enterprise’s capability is based on the quantity and collocation pattern of the heterogeneous resources it possesses. Innovation resources are the source of enterprise innovation capability. However, there is still a “black box” problem of the impact of the intensity of government support on enterprise innovation. Therefore, it is necessary to study high- or low-level enterprise innovation capability by combining the internal and external factors of the enterprise—the background characteristics of R&D personnel and the degree of government support. Based on the configuration perspective, this study uses the qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method to conduct a comparative analysis of the innovation capabilities of enterprises in five time windows over six years with the longitudinal database of China’s industrial enterprises whose operating income exceeds RMB 20 million from 2010 to 2015. This paper summarizes two ways of realizing high-level enterprise innovation capability: female and highly educated R&D personnel type, and highly educated R&D personnel and high government investment type. The enterprise innovation capability is affected simultaneously by multiple conditional variables, and the impact of each conditional variable on enterprise innovation capability has a trend. Further, it analyzes the impact of every antecedent variable comparing high- to low-level enterprise innovation.

COLLOCATIONAL ERRORS IN THE SECOND- DEGREE ENGLISH MAJORS’ VIETNAMESE- ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS AT HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY AND SOLUTIONS

The study was conducted with an aim to know more about the causes and the patterns of the collocational errors that the second- degree English majors at Hanoi Open University often make when they do their Vietnamese- English translation. Different pedagogical solutions are suggested to both translation lecturers and students. The writer makes use of both quantitative and qualitative methods to do the research. The data for the study are the lecturer’s and students’ viewpoints, attitudes, in-class translational activities and practice in the results taken from a questionnaire, translation worksheets, mini-translation tests and (in-class, email) interviews with six translation lecturers and thirty-four second- degree English students. Causes and common collocational error patterns in Vietnamese- English translations have been found out side by side with the plausible solutions. The study will be useful for both lecturers and students to improve the quality of Vietnamese- English translations. In particular, the second- degree English majors will have improvements in making their Vietnamese- English translations more natural and better with collocations.

METODOLOŠKE IMPLIKACIJE ANALIZE POTENCIJALA KOLOKACIJE I KONKORDANCE REČI U TIPIČNOM UDžBENIČKOM DISKURSU

In this paper, we deal with the analysis of textbook discourse and observe the potential of collocation and concordance of content and functional words. This analysis, on the one hand, shows how textbooks from different subjects differ from each other, and on the other hand, questions arise as to how much these are indicators of the content, school subjects, and the author’s solutions when writing the textbooks. The subsystem seen in typical segments of definitional/paradefinitional language in textbook discourse represents a special kind of functional scientific style/register. Given that the analyzed corpus includes textbooks of lower grades of elementary school, it is observed that, within such a limited subsystem of textbook discourse, there are different degrees of complexity of the material that must be conveyed for students from the first to the fourth grade of elementary school. We conclude that more detailed analyses of the collocation patterns of the dominant lexemes must be performed if the functional style/register is to be correctly described concerning the specific features of the authentic textual source.

Gender and Genre in Translation: The Linguistic Construction of Femininity in the American and French Editions of Early 1920s VOGUE

This paper aims to bridge the gap between gender, genre and translation studies by taking an interdisciplinary approach across these research areas and employing some of the tools of corpus linguistics to provide a contrastive analysis of the linguistic construction of femininity in the American and French editions of early-1920s Vogue. In particular, it takes as a sample twenty-four Vogue issues published in 1921 and focuses on its extensive fashion features, originally written in English and then translated or adapted so as to appear in the French edition. A contrastive analysis of two parallel corpora (one consisting of the fashion articles published in 1921 Vogue US and another comprising their translations/adaptations for Vogue France) as regards frequency, collocational patterning and co-textual environment of lexical items pertaining to the domains of fashion and femininity reveals both similarities and differences in the linguistic representation of gender identity across two different cultures, alongside the adoption of particular translation strategies.

The Influence of Reservoir Architecture on the Connectivity of the Shahejie Formation in the Liuzhong Oilfield

The lack of research on fine reservoir structure and sand body patterns in the Jidong Oilfield currently restricts the efficient development of the oilfield. Therefore, this article mainly focuses on the study of the main types of facies of the Shahejie Formation, sand body splicing patterns, and the degree of sand-body connectivity. The interpretation and analysis of well-logging, three-dimensional (3D) seismic, and production data were used to lay the foundation for the study and evaluate the remaining oil distribution. The results indicate that the reservoir sandstones in the study area were mainly deposited in a submerged distributary channel, mouth bar, and distributary channel flank. Using logging information to identify individual sands, a deltaic sand assemblage pattern is proposed by analyzing the sedimentary architecture. In the vertical direction, the deltaic sand body collocation style can be divided into cut-and-stack and separated types. In the lateral direction, the multi-stage sand bodies exhibit three collocation patterns: the side-cutting type, the mouth bar contact type, and the submerged distributary channel flank contact type. The degree of sand-body connectivity under different splicing patterns was analyzed and verified using production dynamic data. It was found that the sand body splicing pattern with a vertical up-cut stack and the sand body splicing pattern with a lateral up-cut had the best inter-sand-body connectivity.

A Corpus-based Study on Collocation Patterns between Focusing Adverbs and Adverbial Clauses

A Corpus-based Study on Collocation Patterns between Focusing Adverbs and Adverbial Clauses

The perspective of the other

Abstract The central question of the paper is whether visual perception serves as a grounding cognitive act for experiencing and reflecting on the other in elegiac poetry. I assume that elegy has a cultural scheme in which the lyric subject can see the environment not only from his own point of view but also from the perspective of the other, and this mental contextualization has reoccurring linguistic patterns (e.g.,the expressions of retrospection/looking backwards, or looking to the natural environment from different points of view) in elegiac tradition. For testing the assumption, I use corpus-based analysing methods: in a quantitative analysis a specific research corpus is built from canonical Hungarian elegies, and it is analysed with Lancsbox with the aim of identifying the characteristic linguistic construction of visual perception. I explore the distribution and the collocational patterns of the Hungarian verbs lát ‘see’, néz ‘look’ and figyel ‘watch’ in the elegy corpus, and keyword analysis is made with the use of a reference corpus built from Hungarian odes.

The Effectiveness of Corpus-Assisted Approach in Learning Grammatical Collocations of Thai Undergraduate Students in an EFL Classroom

The present study implements a corpus-assisted approach with data-driven learning (DDL) in the EFL classroom to investigate its effectiveness in learning target grammatical collocations (verb-, adjective-, and noun-preposition collocations) of Thai undergraduate students and to examine the extent to which the students incorporate the collocational knowledge learned into their writing. Forty students who were inexperienced in DDL in one intact class at a private university in southern Thailand participated in this study. The participants learned through scaffolded paper-based DDL and autonomous computer-based DDL for a total of 10 weeks in an English for Communication course, which aims to develop their communicative abilities. Pre- and post-writing tests, a stimulated recall interview, and a semi-structured interview were employed as the data collection instruments. The writing test results indicate that the participants’ collocational knowledge significantly improved in all patterns (p = 0.00), with a large overall effect size (d = 1.26). The interview results uncover that most participants could accurately: 1) classify the types of the target collocational patterns; 2) identify the hidden usage of the content words with varying prepositions; and 3) elucidate some key considerations when using collocations for their written communication. The results also suggest that the participants have acquired several collocations other than those targeted in DDL. The study concludes with pedagogical implications for DDL implementation and limitations in conducting DDL lessons.

Double-branch deep convolutional neural network-based rice leaf diseases recognition and classification

Deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) has recently made significant strides in classification and recognition of rice leaf disease. The majority of classification models perform disease image recognitions using a collocation patterns including pooling layers, convolutional layers, and fully connected layers, followed by repeating this structure to complete depth increase. However, the key information of the lesion area is locally limited. That is to say, in the case of only performing feature extraction according to the above-mentioned model, redundant and low-correlation image feature information with the lesion area will be received, resulting in low accuracy of the model. For improvement of the network structure and accuracy promotion, here we proposed a double-branch DCNN (DBDCNN) model with a convolutional block attention module (CBAM). The results show that the accuracy of the classic models VGG-16, ResNet-50, ResNet50+CBAM, MobileNet-V2, GoogLeNet, EfficientNet-B1 and Inception-V2 is lower than the accuracy of the model in this paper (98.73%). Collectively, the DBDCNN model here we proposed might be a better choice for classification and identification of rice leaf diseases in the future, based on its novel identification strategy for crop disease diagnosis.

INVESTIGATING THE COLLOCATION OF THE WORDS 'MOM' AND 'DAD' IN ALEC GREVEN'S NOVELS: A CORPUS LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF SEMANTIC PREFERENCES AND PROSODY

This research delves into the collocation and semantic analysis of the words "Mom" and "Dad" in two novels, "How to Talk to Mom?" and "How to Talk to Dad?", authored by a teenage male writer, Alec Greven. The primary objective is to investigate the frequency of occurrence of these parental terms and explore their semantic preferences and prosody within the context of dictions used in the novels. The study uses a mixed-method design, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative approaches to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the research topic. Using corpus linguistic methods, the study examines the frequency of the words "Mom" and "Dad" in each novel, revealing that "Mom" occurs more frequently than "Dad." Through concordance hits, the collocational patterns of the parental terms are analyzed, shedding light on the contexts in which they are commonly used. The collocation analysis demonstrates that "Dad" is frequently associated with family, friendship, and engaging activities, while "Mom" is linked to family, household chores, and maternal preferences. Furthermore, the research explores the semantic prosody of "Mom" and "Dad" revealing that "Dad" is portrayed more positively compared to "Mom."

A Corpus Analysis of Hate Speech in Pakistani Political Discourse on Twitter

This paper is a corpus-based quantitative study on language change that has arisen during national political events, such as the no-confidence movement against Imran Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan. This event, including many others, has given rise to the hate speech in Pakistani community online. In this paper, language change is discussed in terms of hate speech, collocation patterns, frequency of words (Nouns, Adjectives), N-Grams and Urdu hate speech words. A certain political time period is selected to make a comparison of the use of language and explore whether any variations have transpired during the political upheavals. These dynamics are explored because the frequency of hate speech words may suggest that how much aggressive the online political discourse has become. Moreover, it may also suggest that what kind of image is presented to the rest of the world through such usage of words. To find out the case, a data of 50,000 tweets was gathered using Tweetarchivist.com. This data was analyzed through sketch engine. The major findings from the research, reported in this paper, show that many of the tweets, through their collocations and frequency, contain hate speech elements which convey a negative image of the country across the globe.