Stable Word Combinations Research Articles

The Concept of Phraseology in the Lituanistic Sources of 18th Century

[full article and abstract in Lithuanian; abstract in English]
 This article addresses the problem of the concepts phraseologism and phraseology in modern linguistic literature. It analyses the history of the concepts phraseologism and phraseology in the Lituanistic sources of Prussian Lithuania (Lithuania Minor) of 18th century and strives to justify the need to use these terms in their broad rather than narrow sense.
 The terms phraseology and phraseologism are not used in any Lituanistic sources of the 18th century. The Latin term idiotismus, used in the early 18th century philological polemic sources, such as Michael Mörlin’s, Johann Schultz’s and Jacob Perkuhn’s works, is not clearly defined. It could be understood either as (1) a peculiar saying or a figurative expression (i.e., a stable word combination or sentence) or (2) a case of common usage, a language norm recognized by society. The Latin terms Idiotismus, Phrase, Phraseologie, used in the German linguistic literature of the 17th–18th centuries, are not clearly defined either.
 Due to the lack of clear definitions of the concepts phraseologism and phraseology in the Lituanistic sources of the 18th century and in the 18th century German linguistic literature, it would be appropriate to use the terms phraseologism and phraseology in their broad rather than narrow sense, i.e., to regard the stability of not only a word combination but also of a sentence as a distinctive feature of a phraseologism without emphasizing figurativeness or idiomaticity. The suggested definition would be as follows: a phraseologism is a stable word combination or sentence.
 The researchers of old Lituanistic sources need the broad definition for two more reasons. First, in the old dictionaries, ethnographic works, and collections of small folklore genres, stable word combinations and sayings were recorded without selection; as they were presented together as specific linguistic facts of some regional variety, they should be analysed as wholes. Second, these combinations and sayings should also be taken as wholes in the analysis of the speech community that used them – phraseologisms, in the broad sense, can be treated as (re)constructive instruments of social and cultural identity, i.e., the analysis of phraseologisms could be used to recognize the mechanism defining the boundaries of identity and to reconstruct the content of social and cultural life.

Как мысль реализуется в языке: пропозиционально-фреймовая организация гнезд однокоренных слов и устойчивых словосочетаний с единым ядерным компонентом в разноструктурных языках

Как мысль реализуется в языке: пропозиционально-фреймовая организация гнезд однокоренных слов и устойчивых словосочетаний с единым ядерным компонентом в разноструктурных языках

Analysis of statistical methods for stable combinations determination of keywords identification

The study has solved the task of making comparative analysis and choosing an optimal statistical method to determine stable word combinations while identifying keywords to process English-language and Ukrainian-language Web-resources. The effectiveness of the method directly proportionally depends on the quality of linguistic analysis, of Ukrainian and English texts, respectively, based on the technology of Web Mining and NLP. A decomposition of methods of linguistic analysis was performed to determine the impact on the quality of forming stable word combinations as keywords. The features of the method are the adaptation of the morphological and syntactic analyses of lexical units to the peculiarities of Ukrainian-language words/texts. To determine stable word combinations effectively, it is essential to exclude functional words (stops or references), pronouns, numerals and verbs because they are not related to the subject and content of a published work. A set of stable word combinations as keywords is determined by qualitative morphological and syntactic analyses of relevant texts. The set of the identified stable word combinations is used further to compare and determine the degree of the text relevance to a specific topic or user request. The internal “dynamics” of forming a set of stable word combinations as keywords was investigated in the study depending on the statistical method applied to the texts. The obtained results have been verified. The study has produced results of the experimental testing of the proposed content-monitoring method for determining stable word combinations to identify keywords in the processing of English-language and Ukrainian-language web-resources of the technical content based on Web Mining technology. It has been determined that the authors of published works often identify the keywords that are far from being considered. It has also been proven that the quality of the result is influenced by the quality of linguistic analysis of texts and subsequent filtering. Further experimental research requires approbation of the proposed method for determining keywords for other categories of texts – scientific, humanitarian, belletristic, journalistic, etc.

Using Small Parallel Corpora to Develop Collocation-Centred Activities in Specialized Translation Classes

Abstract The research devoted to special languages as well as the activities carried out in specialized translation classes tend to focus primarily on one-word or multi-word terminological units. However, a very important part in the making of specialist registers and texts is played by specialised collocations, i.e. relatively stable word combinations that do not designate concepts but are nevertheless of frequent use in a given field of activity. This is why helping students acquire competences relative to the identification and processing of collocations should become an important objective in specialised translation classes. An easily accessible and dependable resource that may be successfully used to this purpose is represented by corpora and corpus analysis tools, whose usefulness in translator training has been highlighted by numerous studies. This article proposes a series of practical, task-based activities-developed with the help of a small-size parallel corpus of specialised texts-that aim to raise the translation trainees′ awareness of the collocations present in specialised texts and to provide suggestions about their processing in translation.