Collocational Patterns Research Articles

Moths to the Flame: Examining Foreign Collocation Patterns in the Bio-Pharmaceutical Industry

We examine the foreign direct investment (FDI) activities of firms from both developed and emerging markets (EM) in a highly developed science and technology cluster, the bio-pharmaceutical industry. We create a unique dataset that allows us to analyze the collocation patterns and configurations of 19,843 offices, including 3,261 foreign offices from 61 foreign countries operating in the United States (U.S.) over the past four decades up until 2018. Using a mix-methods approach, we find there is no one-size-fits-all optimal set of characteristics for attracting foreign investments. We developed a four-tiered ranking scheme to differentiate collocation nuances ranging from established (tier one) to least established (tier four) clusters. Our results show that while foreign companies from emerging markets have a stronger preference to collocate in more established clusters and in clusters with a larger proportion of other foreign firms, they also have preferred collocation patterns and are more likely to collocate in clusters with specific resource configurations. Thus, depending upon the type of firm and where they come from, foreign firms have either more or less collocation choices. Our results have important theoretical and managerial implications.

A corpus-based contrastive analysis of I think in spoken Hong Kong English: Research from the International Corpus of English (ICE)

ABSTRACT Most previous studies on discourse markers (DMs) have yielded a common finding, that is, native speakers of English (NSs) and non-native speakers of English (NNSs) use discourse markers in different ways, especially as regards frequency of occurrence, position and function. Although discourse markers, such as I think, I mean and you know, are sometimes syntactically peripheral and poor in semantic meaning, they are pragmatically indispensable in spoken discourse and serve a variety of pragmatic functions. This study focuses on one of the most frequently overused discourse markers by NNSs, I think, and presents a comparative analysis of I think as used by Hong Kong English (HKE) speakers and British English (BrE) speakers in terms of its frequency of occurrence, position, collocation patterns and pragmatic functions, based on two parallel corpora: the Hong Kong component (ICE–HK) and the British component (ICE–GB) of the International Corpus of English (ICE). By highlighting similarities and differences in the use of I think by HKE and BrE speakers, this study also examines possible reasons that may lead to these.

Lexical Competition and Change: A Corpus-Assisted Investigation of Gambling and Gaming in the Past Centuries

This article investigates the interplay of lexical competition and socio-historical events through a close examination of the use of gambling and gaming based on large-scale synchronic and diachronic corpora. We first set the background for comparison through a synchronic study of the collocational patterns and grammatical relations of the two words using Sketch Engine. We show that gambling tends to be associated with negatively perceived activities and strong disapproval, whereas gaming tends to collocate with recreational activities, business, and technology. Using Google Books Ngram Viewer, we focus on the drastic diachronic changes in use of the two words, from competition to co-development. Based on corpora trends, we correlate the rise and fall of the two words and the change in their competition relation to particular socio-historical events: gold rushes, sports betting, the popularity of video games, and the gaming industry boom. The classical competition model of near synonyms remained valid until recent socio-economic events introduced additional and unique meanings for both words. The article thus shows that linguistic variations as collective human behavior changes can be leveraged to evidence other collective human behavior changes.

A Corpus-based Study of Minimizers in British Spoken Discourse

Intensifiers are among the most widely used adverbs in spoken discourse, and the study of intensifiersor degree adverbs has been a popular topic in English linguistics (Bolinger (1972), Backlund (1973), Leech and Svartvik (1975), Quirk et al. (1985), Allerton (1987), Lorenz (2002), Biber et al. (2002), and Huddleston & Pullum (2002)). However, a close look at the literature on intensifiers reveals that the vast majority of the previous research focuses on one specific type, i.e. ‘amplifiers’ (cf. Peters 1992; Lorenz 2002; Méndez-Naya 2003, among others), while other subcategories of intensifiers distinguished in the standard grammar of English have received little attention. To the best of my knowledge downtoners have been assessed only to a very limited extent in British and American English conversation. Thus, this research paper is an attempt to address this gap in the literature, by focusing on one of the neglected sub-categories, viz. minimizers. Specifically, the research aims at providing a comprehensive account of the syntactic and semantic features of minimizers and their functional distribution in British English conversation. The study follows the methodology of corpus linguistics. The data are collected from the spoken texts of The International Corpus of English, the British component (henceforth ICE-GB) which contains a million words from 200 written and 300 spoken English texts, and is broadly representative of British English. The International Corpus of English Utility Program (ICECUP III) is used to build subcorpora according to the syntactic variables of our choice in this study, viz, the frequency of downtoners, their functional distribution and their collocational patterns. The ICECUP III is used throughout the research for obtaining and analyzing the data through a qualitative- quantitative mixed-methods approach. The results of the analysis reveal that in terms of frequency, the occurrence rate of minimizers in British conversation is markedly low, ie, they are used quite less frequently than other downtoners. Also, among all other minimizers, at all has the highest frequency of use in British conversation. The results of the analysis of the functional distribution of minimizers demonstrate that at all is most often used as sentence adverbial, while the others are used mainly as modifiers.

A corpus-based approach to comparing English textbook pedagogies: The case of Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China

ABSTRACT The current study considers the notion that English textbooks produced for different markets are likely to manifest different pedagogical emphases. The study begins the research context by contemplating possible similarities and differences between English textbooks produced in two neighbouring markets, Hong Kong (HK) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), citing socio-historical and educational reasons to elucidate why there could be a first impression of differences in the two sets of textbooks. A simple consideration of these factors does not aid an understanding of the teaching dispositions of these materials. The present study uses a corpus-based hermeneutic approach to examine collocational patterns in the task instructions of textbooks. Collocations within this section can effectively capture local teaching practices, as it is in these places task purposes are announced and pedagogies are specified. The findings section presents two collocation lists generated from the two textbook corpora. Based on these lists, the researcher interprets the local teaching practices of the textbooks. Key issues to be discussed include the distribution of four skills in the textbooks, different styles of literacy training, the strong lexical-grammatical focus of the PRC textbooks, and the genre-aware approach of the HK textbooks.

“So you know ehn … ” The use of bilingual interjections in Nigerian English

Abstract This paper investigates four bilingual interjections: na wa, shikena, ehn, and ehen, with the objective of exploring their sources, meanings, frequencies, spelling stability, positions, collocational patterns and discourse-pragmatic functions in Nigerian English. The data which were obtained from the Nigerian component of the Global Web-based English corpus were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively, using the theory of pragmatic borrowing. The results indicate that na wa, which is loaned from Nigerian Pidgin, is actually a modified form of a Hausa expression, na wahala, shikena is borrowed from Hausa, while ehn and ehen are loaned from Yoruba. Na wa is an emotive interjection, shikena and ehen are cognitive interjections, while ehn can function both as phatic and as emotive interjections. Both ehn and ehen also function as pragmatic markers. The study thus extends research on the discourse-pragmatic features of Nigerian English.

Sketching women: a corpus-based approach to representations of women's agency in political Internet corpora in Arabic and English

In this paper, I use methods from corpus linguistics to examine patterns pertaining to the representation of women in online Arabic- and English-language political corpora. I highlight the discursive differences and similarities that characterise the two corpora. Using word sketches, I identify representational categories in each corpus that are indexed by patterns of collocation. Analysis of semantic preference and prosody in each corpus reveals the ways in which women are represented. An exploration of the representations of women and gendered agency in both corpora reveals incongruities between the message of women's empowerment that the outlets promote and the implicit discursive representations of gender and gendered agency.

The Use of Perspective Markers and Connectives in Expressing Subjectivity: Evidence from Collocational Analyses


 This study explores how subjectivity is expressed in coherence relations, by means of a distinctive collocational analysis on two Chinese causal connectives: the specific subjective kejian ‘so’, used in subjective argument-claim relations, and the underspecified suoyi ‘so’, which can be used in both subjective argument-claim and objective cause-consequence relations. On the basis of both Horn’s pragmatic Relation and Quality principles and the Uniform Information Density Theory, we hypothesized that the presence of other linguistic elements expressing subjectivity in a discourse segment should be related the degree of subjectivity encoded by the connective. In line with this hypothesis, the association scores showed that suoyi is more frequently combined with perspective markers expressing epistemic stance: cognition verbs and modal verbs. Kejian, which already expresses epistemic stance, co-occurred more often with perspective markers related to attitudinal stance, such as markers of expectedness and importance. The paper also pays attention to similarities and differences in collocation patterns across contexts and genres.

Corpus-based empirical approach to professionalism

Although research on professional competence has has adopted a number of approaches that have highlighted the importance of practice and values in enacting a professional identity, there is currently no established framework for empirical investigations. Based on a discourse analytic framework, this paper demonstrates how ethical codes in a number of consulting professions (law, accountancy and engineering/surveying) can be analyzed empirically by focusing on the collocation patterns found in the genre. The analysis will focus on how professionals are expected to behave in relation to two identity components in their ideal conducts of behavior: identity roles (or identity shifts) and identity virtues (positive attributes associated with a particular role). The engineering profession is found to have a fairly even representation of most of the identity roles identified: provider to client, unspecified/general, professional peer, employer and professional association. The legal profession places greater emphasis on the roles of provider to client and professional peer, whereas accountancy professionals tend to represent their identity roles more generally, although the role of provider to client remains an important category. With regard to identity virtues, i.e., the ideal dispositions or values displayed, all three professions highlight the primacy of professional standards or competence, with integrity and responsibility also emphasized by some.

The creation and evaluation of a grammar pattern list for the most frequent academic verbs

The current research project was designed according to the conceptualization that vocabulary knowledge is multidimensional (Jaen, 2007; Qian & Schedl, 2004) and the learning of grammatical and collocational patterns should be considered as important as, if not more important than, the acquisition of semantic knowledge of single words. The purposes of the project were to (1) propose a method of extracting grammar patterns for the most frequent content words (verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs) in a given corpus; and (2) derive a tentative grammar pattern list for the 115 most frequent academic verbs.The extraction of grammar patterns was realized through a rule-based programming approach, where the researchers coded all possible patterns of the most frequent academic verbs and used the script to extract grammar patterns from a given corpus. The extracted grammar patterns were compiled with corpus-based frequency information and developed into a grammar pattern list for the top-frequency academic verbs. The grammar pattern list is expected to complement the widely used EAP (English for academic purposes) word list, the Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davies, 2014), by specifying the frequency of each verb patterns (e.g. provide n with n, select n from n, base n on n).

Using signed language collocations to investigate acquisition: A commentary on Ambridge (2020)

The visual-manual modality of sign languages renders them a unique test case for language acquisition and processing theories. In this commentary the authors describe evidence from signed languages, and ask whether it is consistent with Ambridge’s proposal. The evidence includes recent research on collocations in American Sign Language that reveal collocational frequency effects and patterns that do not constitute syntactic constituents. While these collocations appear to resist fully abstract schematization, further consideration of how speakers create exemplars and how they link exemplar clouds based on tokens and how much abstraction is involved in their creation is warranted.

Bilingual pragmatic markers in Nigerian English

AbstractThis paper examines six bilingual pragmatic markers: jare, biko, jor, shebi, shey, and fa which are borrowed from indigenous Nigerian languages into Nigerian English, with a view to examining their sources, meanings, frequencies, spelling stability, positions, collocational patterns, and discourse‐pragmatic functions in Nigerian English. The data for the study, drawn from the International Corpus of English‐Nigeria and the Nigerian component of the Global Web‐based English corpus, are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic perspective. The findings show that jare, jor, shebi, and shey are borrowed from Yoruba, biko is from Igbo while fa is from Hausa. Jare, jor, and biko function as mitigation and emphasis markers, shebi and shey serve as agreement‐seeking markers while fa is an emphasis pragmatic marker. The study, thus, contributes to the growing research on bilingual pragmatic markers in second‐language contexts.

Living in between a house and a home: Where’s the comfort zone anyway? Dislocated identities in Morrison’s "The Bluest Eye" and Cisneros’ "The House on Mango Street"

This paper aims to provide a reflection on literary representations of home alternatively to current collocations in the media, in the psychological and sociological realm (home vs comfort zone). The selection of two postcolonial texts, one by Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970), and another by Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984), provides ways-in to discuss changing social and cultural experiences with a focus on characters’ search for identity in a multicultural and multilingual setting, as is the one in the United States. The study will depart from a brief theoretical survey (Anderson 1991) to a corpus-based approach which maps such shifts and changes (Baker 2006) while resorting to a close analysis of contexts of occurrence of the keywords home and house, along with their patterns of collocation, in the texts under scope (from the sentence to the textual levels, following Biber et al. 1998; Sinclair 2004, among other). The analysis is meant to unveil ways in which writers make use of linguistic structures and most importantly what it means to be at home when characters never felt welcome there, or characters’ inner / outer struggle to develop a sense of belonging in disrupted settings.

Source Domain Verification Using Corpus-based Tools

ABSTRACTSource domain verification has not received as much attention as criteria for metaphor identification in the study of conceptual metaphor. In this paper, we provide a replicable approach to source domain verification which we hope will provide a foundation for new approaches to this important question. We adopt an empirical method extended from previous research that used corpus-based linguistic tools such as SUMO (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology), WordNet, collocational patterns and an online dictionary. We present a new, step-by-step procedure to verify which keywords may be categorized in the source domain of building, using data from the Corpus of Hong Kong Political Speeches which contains parsed Chinese-language speeches by Hong Kong Chief Executives of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (1997–2014). Following the verification of a number of keywords in the building source domain, we discuss how this method may be adapted for other source domains and languages and discuss its application to various areas of study within metaphor research as well as the current limitations of this approach.

Korpusni pristop kot metoda raziskovanja in učenja tujega strokovnega jezika

The present paper examines various methods of compiling and analysing two LSP corpora. By means of comparing frequency lists and keywords, a basic multidimensional analysis is carried out in order to illustrate language variation in different text types and genres from the two specialist domains in terms of collocational and colligational patterns of language use. A number of freely available corpus analysis tools are explored to support the claim that corpus-based research can be helpful in identifying key specialist and semi-specialist vocabulary and thus enhance LSP teaching courses. Keywords: LSP, teaching approaches, corpus linguistics

CHURCH SLAVONIC BORROWINGS IN THE LEXICAL SYSTEM OF UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE OF 16–17 CENTURIES

The article describes Church Slavonic loanwords' functioning and use in the lexical-semantic system of the Ukrainian written literary language of the XVI – first half of the XVII century. It discloses the concepts of «Church Slavonic language», «Church Slavonic loanwords». The composition and semantics of Slavonic loanwords in the language of various genres of Ukrainian memos (certificates, court documents, wills, diplomas, descriptions of castles, rounders Hetman of offices, documents of the Church and school fraternities, annals, works of religious polemic and imaginative literature, memos of scientific and educational literature, liturgical books etc.), walked to the source base of «Dictionary of the Ukrainian language of 16 – the first half 17 centuries» and its unique lexical card index are clarified. The study highlights specific features of the investigated borrowings in the Ukrainian language, specified time, set them apart from other words (Latinisms, Grecisms, Polonisms, and the like). These features are most active at the phonetic, word formation, and semantic levels of language. It is established that in the course of the historical development of the Church Slavonic language, some Church Slavonic loanwords, under the influence of the phonetic features of the Ukrainian language (the pronunciation of ancient etymological ы and и as a single sound in the front row and high raise [и]; use e in place of the stressed or unstressed ѣ; pronunciation of ѣ as i «new» ѣ at the place of the etymological e; writing e in place of Proto-Slavic ę; the alternation у/в; sound transformation in the individual prefixes and suffix; the softening of the ц; the transition in unstressed position у – о; loss of primary і; simplification in groups of consonants, etc.), changes in the sound structure of the word. Part of the Church Slavonic words, adapting to the semantic system of the Ukrainian language of 16 – the first half 17 centuries, changed to lexico-semantic level, particularly the expansion or narrowing semantics. Other old Church Slavonic lexemes are components of the diverse lexico-grammatical patterns of collocations and idioms connected with the Church ritual sphere. Keywords: adaptation, written memos, semantics, phrases, phonetic changes, Church Slavonicism.

Collocational Patterns of the Near-Synonyms Error, Fault, and Mistake

Collocational Patterns of the Near-Synonyms Error, Fault, and Mistake

Collocation and Selectional Preferences: A Frame-based Approach

Most of the research conducted into collocation and semantic frames has dealt with these phenomena separately. The study of collocation has not figured prominently in the research agenda of frame semantics, and frame semantics has only sporadically been used as an analytical framework for collocation. This article is a contribution to narrowing the gap between the two fields. It does so by addressing key issues in the design of a frame-based approach to collocation, with a special focus on the relation between collocational patterns and semantic valency, and by providing arguments for the efficacy of the frame-semantic theoretical apparatus in explaining verb-adjective links that are not accounted for by the existing models of collocation. The methodology combines lexicographic resources as well as quantitative and qualitative analysis of examples and data from an English web corpus (ukWaC).

Pragmatic functions of I think in computer-mediated, cross-cultural communication between Taiwanese and Japanese undergraduate students

Abstract This study explores the functions of I think in synchronous, computer-mediated cross-cultural communication of Japanese and Taiwanese university students. The data used in this study were collected from the Cross-Cultural Distance Learning corpus, which contains transcriptions of recorded synchronous spoken and written interactions between Taiwanese and Japanese university students. To examine the functions of I think, occurrences of the phrase were screened, analyzed, and categorized based on collocation pattern, discourse context, and sequentiality. The Taiwanese students showed a greater tendency to use the various functions of I think in discourse than the Japanese students, who rarely used its functions in their online cross-cultural communication. The results suggest that their respective perceived conversation strategies may be a significant cause of variation in the frequency of use of I think functions.

(Re)manufacturing consent in English

Abstract Unlike the use of force or coercion, the articulation of ideological discourse constitutes a softer approach in the legitimation and hegemonic rule of dominant political actors, achieved through manufacturing consent (Gramsci 1971). As a major site of ideology, the televised premier’s press conferences in China represent such a discursive event, enabling the Chinese government to convey its discursive formations or “regime of truth” (Foucault 1984) and in doing so to manufacture consent. Benefitting from a corpus containing 20 years of China’s Premier-Meets-the-Press conference data (1998–2017), this corpus-based critical discourse analysis (CDA) study explores the government-affiliated interpreters’ mediation and (re)construction of China’s discourse on PEOPLE. The interpreters are found to reinforce China’s discourse on PEOPLE (e.g., increased mentions of PEOPLE-related items) and (re)construct a more positive image of Beijing being people-oriented and concerned with its people in English (e.g., the repeated employment of ‘our people’). An examination of the collocational patterns relating to the item ‘people’ (e.g., people’s, of/to/for/by*people) (re)presented in the English discourse sheds light on the government‒people ties in China. This article highlights the government interpreters’ vital agency role in image (re)construction and in contributing to the government’s political legitimation and hegemonic rule, particularly given the increasingly mediat(is)ed world we live in.