Transcript Corpus Linguists

Words in combinations: Collocations
Word Usage and Vocabulary in context
Lecture 8
do homework
×make homework
make mistakes
×do mistakes
tall man/woman ×tall man/woman
high mountain
×high mountain
• Fast food, but not quick food
• Quick look, but not fast look
• Commit suicide, but not make suicide
• Cut a finger, but not cut grass
• Mow grass, but not mow a finger
dead
boring, certain, drunk,
stupid, sure, tired, worried
heavily
drink,
smoke
rain
The meaning ‘beginning
 start/begin (theatre performance etc.)
 kick off (soccer match)
 fall (night)
 break (day or dawn, poetic language)
What is a collocation?
• Collocation means a natural
combination of words; It refers to
the way words are closely associated
with each other.
Why learn collocations?
• They will help you to speak and write
English in a more natural and accurate way.
• Learning collocations will also help you to
increase your range of English vocabualry.
Caution
• We cannot substitute a word in a
collocation with a related word.
• Collocations should not be confused with
idioms.
Free combination→bound collocation→ frozen
idiom
Exercises
• http://www.betterenglish.com/strongcollocation/coll1.htm
• http://www.englishmedialab.com/cloze/Adjective%2
0noun%20collocation/index.html
• http://www.edict.com.hk/vlc/collocation/wordpartner
s1.htm
Corpus linguistics
• It is the study of language as expressed in
samples (corpora) or "real world" text.
• Corpus lingusitics uses large collections of
both spoken and written natural texts that
are stored on computers.
Corpus linguistics
• Corpus lingusits can explore different
questions about language use.
• Corpus Linguists specify a Key Word in
Context (KWIC) and identify the words
immediately surrounding them. This gives
an idea of the way words are used.
Collocations in corpus linguistics
• In corpus linguistics, collocation is defined
as a sequence of words or terms which cooccur more often than would be expected
by chance.
Collocation comprises the restrictions
on how words can be used together, for
example which prepositions are used
with particular verbs, or which verbs
and nouns are used together.
Links to Online Corpora
• http://www.americancorpus.org/
• http://www.lextutor.ca/concord_writer/