How ‘chunky’ is language? Some estimates based on Sinclair's Idiom Principle

Nelson, Robert

doi:10.3366/cor.2018.0156

Cited by 24 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…It is tempting to claim that these strongly entrenched specific patterns are represented as holistic chunks in the minds of the respective speakers ( Sinclair 1991 ; Wray 2002 ; Nelson 2018 ). Rather than putting together that’s and right or that’s and fine compositionally by means of syntactic operations, speakers who routinely use these patterns probably have them available as ready-made chunks or prefabs in their mental lexicons ( Gobet et al, 2001 ; Ellis 2017 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

That’s Cool. Computational Sociolinguistic Methods for Investigating Individual Lexico-grammatical Variation

Schmid¹,

Würschinger²,

Fischer

et al. 2021

Front. Artif. Intell.

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The present study deals with variation in the use of lexico-grammatical patterns and emphasizes the need to embrace individual variation. Targeting the pattern that’s adj (as in that’s right, that’s nice or that’s okay) as a case study, we use a tailor-made Python script to systematically retrieve grammatical and semantic information about all instances of this construction in BNC2014 as well as sociolinguistic information enabling us to study social and individual lexico-grammatical variation among speakers who have used this pattern. The dataset amounts to 4,394 tokens produced by 445 speakers using 159 adjective types in 931 conversations. Using detailed descriptive statistics and mixed-effects regression models, we show that while the choice of some adjectives is partly determined by social variables, situational and especially individual variation is rampant overall. Adopting a cognitive-linguistic perspective and relying on the notion of entrenchment, we interpret these findings as reflecting individual speakers' routines. We argue that computational sociolinguistics is in an ideal position to contribute to the data-driven investigation of individual lexico-grammatical variation and encourage computational sociolinguists to grab this opportunity. For the routines of individual speakers ultimately both underlie and compromise systematic social variation and trigger and steer well-known types of language change including grammaticalization, pragmaticalization and change by invited inference.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

That’s Cool. Computational Sociolinguistic Methods for Investigating Individual Lexico-grammatical Variation

Schmid¹,

Würschinger²,

Fischer

et al. 2021

Front. Artif. Intell.

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“…Importantly, the goal of this research is not to measure the amount of formulaic language (cf. Forsyth & Grabowski 2015;Nelson 2018), but to describe the formulaic profile of the sample of Russian PILs by identifying those linguistic items that account for its highly patterned and clichéd style.…”

Section: Research Materials and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When studying a natural language, with various purposes in mind, linguists of various schools often refer to it as formulaic. In recent years, the linguistically-oriented research on formulaicity has been flourishing (e.g., Wray, 2002Wray, , 2008Wray, , 2009Schmitt & Carter, 2004;Wood, 2010aWood, , 2010bWood, , 2015Kecskes, 2016;Myles & Cordier, 2017;Nelson, 2018;Pęzik, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distinctive Lexical Patterns in Russian Patient Information Leaflets: A Corpus-Driven Study

Grabowski

Лукаш²

2019

Russian Journal of Linguistics

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This methodologically-oriented corpus-driven study focuses on distinctive patterns of language use in a specialized text type, namely Russian patient information leaflets. The study’s main goal is to identify keywords and recurrent sequences of words that account for the leaflets’ formulaicity, and - as a secondary goal - to describe their discoursal functions. The keywords were identified using three methods (G2, Hedges’ g and Neozeta) and the overlap between the three metrics was explored. The overlapping keywords were qualitatively analyzed in terms of discoursal functions. As for the distinctive multi-word patterns, we focused on recurrent n-grams with the largest coverage in the corpus: these were identified using the Formulex method (Forsyth, 2015b), which provides complementary data with respect to more conservative n- gram and lexical bundles approaches. The results revealed that the most distinctive keywords were identified using Hedges’ g metric, that the largest overlap occurred between G2 and Neozeta metrics, and that the frequent use and discoursal functions of the identified lexical patterns correspond with situational contexts and communicative purposes of patient information leaflets. It is hoped that this study will provide an opportunity for a methodological reflection and inspire further corpus-driven research on distinctive recurrent lexical patterns (e.g., keywords, n-grams, lexical bundles) or - more generally - on formulaic language in texts originally written in Russian.

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“…This predictability can be operationalized as the mutual information between the words of a phrase (Church and Hanks, 1989 ): a higher mutual information score between two words suggests higher predictability. Based on this notion, Nelson ( 2018 ) analyzed several corpora and compared the mutual information between the components of all occurring bigrams and their expected baseline based on frequency. His estimates confirm the ranges mentioned above, with a high 50% to a low of 20% for the proportion of bigrams that can be considered formulaic.…”

Section: The Ubiquity Of Multiunit Expressionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Models of Language and Multiword Expressions

Kallens

Christiansen

2022

Front. Artif. Intell.

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Traditional accounts of language postulate two basic components: words stored in a lexicon, and rules that govern how they can be combined into meaningful sentences, a grammar. But, although this words-and-rules framework has proven itself to be useful in natural language processing and cognitive science, it has also shown important shortcomings when faced with actual language use. In this article, we review evidence from language acquisition, sentence processing, and computational modeling that shows how multiword expressions such as idioms, collocations, and other meaningful and common units that comprise more than one word play a key role in the organization of our linguistic knowledge. Importantly, multiword expressions straddle the line between lexicon and grammar, calling into question how useful this distinction is as a foundation for our understanding of language. Nonetheless, finding a replacement for the foundational role the words-and-rules approach has played in our theories is not straightforward. Thus, the second part of our article reviews and synthesizes the diverse approaches that have attempted to account for the central role of multiword expressions in language representation, acquisition, and processing.

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How ‘chunky’ is language? Some estimates based on Sinclair's Idiom Principle

Cited by 24 publications

References 59 publications

That’s Cool. Computational Sociolinguistic Methods for Investigating Individual Lexico-grammatical Variation

That’s Cool. Computational Sociolinguistic Methods for Investigating Individual Lexico-grammatical Variation

Distinctive Lexical Patterns in Russian Patient Information Leaflets: A Corpus-Driven Study

Models of Language and Multiword Expressions

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