2. Disentangling the phraseological web

Abstract

Although phraseology has recently begun to establish itself as a field in its own right, this process is being hindered by two main factors: the highly variable and wide-ranging scope of the field and the vast and confusing terminology associated with it. This chapter tackles these two issues successively in an attempt to disentangle the 'phraseological web'. We first draw up a clear distinction between two major approaches to the study of multi-word units, i.e. the phraseological approach and the distributional or frequency-based approach, which have set quite different boundaries to the field. We then argue that the variations in scope that characterize the field of phraseology are a direct result of its fuzzy borders with four neighbouring disciplines: semantics, morphology, syntax and discourse. We describe some of the most influential typologies of word combinations within the phraseological approach and present a categorization of multi-word units emerging from the distribution... AbstractAlthough phraseology has recently begun to establish itself as a field in its own right, this process is being hindered by two main factors: the highly variable and wide-ranging scope of the field and the vast and confusing terminology associated with it. This chapter tackles these two issues successively in an attempt to disentangle the 'phraseological web'. We first draw up a clear distinction between two major approaches to the study of multi-word units, i.e. the phraseological approach and the distributional or frequencybased approach, which have set quite different boundaries to the field. We then argue that the variations in scope that characterize the field of phraseology are a direct result of its fuzzy borders with four neighbouring disciplines: semantics, morphology, syntax and discourse. We describe some of the most influential typologies of word combinations within the phraseological approach and present a categorization of multi-word units emerging from the distributional approach. We conclude with suggestions regarding both the scope of the field and the terminology used.

First-year university students’ productive knowledge of collocations

“…Corpus-driven studies analyse learners' essays in corpora, with attempts to make inventories of and categorise the errors produced by these learners (cf. Cowie 1998, Granger 1998, Granger and Paquot 2008, Howarth 1998, Laufer and Waldman 2011, Nesselhauf 2005. A common observation of these studies is that collocations cause difficulties for L2 learners even at an advanced level, and most errors are first-language (L1) related Waldman 2011, Nesselhauf 2005).…”

A Comparison of Three Metrics for Detecting Cross- Linguistic Variations in Information Volume and Multiword Expressions Between Parallel Bitexts

“…The third failure of the CWP algorithm seems to be different in that it relies on a correct analysis of a particular verb acting as a function word (modal auxiliary) in some contexts and as a content word (main verb) in other contexts 8 . In this case, it seems that adding an automatic POS tagging step in the CWP algorithm may help to resolve this specific issue.…”

“…The study of MWEs in parallel segments is of the utmost importance to crosslinguistic phraseological studies as described in Colson (2008), and hence to transla-1 tion studies and phraseological studies. Determining which metric is most accurate in detecting MWEs will also contribute to recent works in corpus-based phraseology such as Granger and Paquot (2008) and will allow the mining of a large spectrum of MWEs (such as clusters, lexical bundles, n-grams, recurrent sequences) or even new classes of MWEs. Just like any corpus-based approach, our new bilingual approach is designed to complement other traditional monolingual approaches such as appear in volumes 1 and 2 of the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English (Cowie & Mackin, 1975;Cowie, Mackin & McCaig, 1983).…”

Refining the methodology for investigating the relationship between fluency and the use of formulaic language in learner speech

“…The first procedure is an automated, frequency-based extraction of recurrent continuous sequences of two and more words from the data -n-gramswhich is performed using Compleat Lex Tutor's N-gram Phrase Extractor software (Cobb 2015). The second one is a three-stage manual, intuition-and criterion-based identification whose starting point is Granger and Paquot's (2008) taxonomy of phrasemes. This classification provides a necessary foundation for the preliminary search.…”

“…Here, a list of phrasemes was generated for each learner using a three-stage procedure. First, candidate strings were extracted manually by the author basing on the taxonomy of phraseological units proposed by Granger and Paquot (2008). To date, this taxonomy provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of the types of phraseological units (Figure 2).…”