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Instructors: Prof. Dr. phil. Stefan Evert
Event type:
proseminar
Org-unit: Dept. 02 - Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies
Displayed in timetable as:
Linguistic Theory
Subject:
Crediting for:
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | -
Literature:
- Bartsch, Sabine (2004). Structural and Functional Properties of Collocations in English. Narr, Tübingen.
- Evert, Stefan (2008). Corpora and collocations. In A. Lüdeling and M. Kytö (eds.), Corpus Linguistics. An International Handbook, chapter 58. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Extended manuscript: http://purl.org/stefan.evert/PUB/Evert2007HSK_extended_manuscript.pdf
- Sinclair, John (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- Hoey, Michael (2005). Lexical Priming: A new theory of words and language. Routledge, London.
- Stubbs, Michael (2001). Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. Blackwell, Oxford.
- Additional references will be provided in the course.
Preconditions:
- Students wanting to attend this proseminar must have successfully completed the foundational course Introduction to linguistics and/or Einführung in die Sprachwissenschaft. No previous knowledge of corpus linguistics or computational text analysis is required.
Official Course Description:
- Since J. R. Firth, the notion of collocation – i.e. the observation that words tend to appear in certain recurrent combinations (e.g. commit a crime, reckless abandon, eat humble pie), which stands in contrast to the open choice principle underlying linguistic creativity – has played a central role in English linguistics. Proficient native speakers are intuitively aware of such collocational patterns, and learners need to acquire collocational knowledge in order to produce natural-sounding, idiomatic English. Some word combinations are so frequent that the choice of one constituent seems to trigger the selection of the other constituent(s) automatically.
- In this seminar, we will look at different aspects and types of collocation, ranging from pre-fabricated units such as fixed idioms (e.g. the infamous kick the bucket) to words that show a preference for a certain semantic context (e.g. the negative semantic prosody of cause) or a particular syntactic neighbourhood (known as a collostruction).
- We will discuss different (i) theoretical approaches to the phenomenon collocation, (ii) explanations for the underlying mechanisms, (iii) the classification of word combinations into different types of collocation, (iv) their automatic identification in electronic corpora, and (v) applications in lexicography, language teaching and natural language processing.
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