Corpus, concordance, collocation

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Corpus, concordance, collocation
Corso diLingua Inglese 1
Fisciano - SA - 11 ottobre 2007
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CORPORA

• Text Database to be examined with
• Software (concordancer) Concapp Wordsmith tools
  etc
• in order to observe the behaviour of key words in
  context
• Examples

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WHAT IS A CORPUS?

• A corpus (plural corpora) is a large collections
  of authentic texts that have been stored on a
  computerised database.
• Any collection of more than one text can be
  called a corpus (as corpus is Latin for body,
  hence a corpus is any body of written or spoken
  text).
• A corpus helps to understand more about the
  language and how people use it.

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CORPUS LINGUISTICS

• It is the study of language through the use of
  corpora and the observation of real language.

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EXAMPLES OF CORPORA

• COBUILD - Collins-Birmingham University
  International Language Database (200 million
  words).
• British National Corpus (100 million words).
• Cambridge International Corpus (over 1 billion
  words).
• Cambridge Learner Corpus (25 million words).

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CONCORDANCE LINES

• A corpus organises the texts in concordance lines
  using a special concordance software called Key
  Word in Context (KWIC).
• A concordance line is a single line of text,
  often with words cut off at the beginning and at
  the end of the line.
• (study
  skills handout 4)

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WHAT IS A COLLOCATION?

• It is the way words tend to occur or belong
  together.
• Example
• Meals will be served outside on the terrace,
  weather permitting.
• (NOT -weather allowing)

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• We should know a word by the company it keeps.
• J. R. Firth (1957)
  

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TASK 1

• What is the difference between make and do?
• Can you explain why you say
  do your homework
  and NOT
  make your homework
• ?

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Which of the verbs speak, say, tell fit best into
the gaps in these examples?

• 1. (on the phone) HelloHello, come on ___
  something!
• 2. To ___ the truth, I was expecting it from
  someone so selfish.
• 3. As I ___, theyve already appointed somebody.
• 4. Shall we ___ two oclock?
• 5. Usually actions ___ louder than words.
• 6. He can ____ such funny stories.

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• 1. (on the phone) HelloHello, come on say
  something!
• 2. To tell the truth, I was expecting it from
  someone so selfish.
• 3. As I said, theyve already appointed somebody.
• 4. Shall we say two oclock?
• 5. Usually actions speak louder than words.
• 6. He can tell such funny stories.

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THE ROLE OF COLLOCATIONS

• Language collocations are mainly a matter of
  convention and they are not necessarily based on
  compatibility of meaning.
• Words are not normally used in isolation and
  therefore there is no use in learning single
  words.
• It is more efficient to learn the whole and break
  it into parts.
• It is more difficult to learn the parts and then
  put them together.

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Collocations are arbitrary they are only decided
by linguistic conventions

• high/tall building, tall boy.
• look at a person/a problem, gaze at a person.

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Learning collocations will help

• effective communication,
• thinking more quickly,
• focusing attention on the larger structure of
  discourse,
• developing fluency based on the acquisition of a
  large store of fixed and semi-fixed,
  prefabricated chunks.

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IDENTIFYING COLLOCATIONS

• As a collocation is the way words co-occur
  together we are considering a very wide area.
• It would be better to narrow down the kind of
  words we are looking at. There are different
  kinds of collocation we can highlight, such as
  the following

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TYPES OF COLLOCATIONS

• ? adjective noun plain chocolate
• ? noun noun a cheque book
• ? verd adjective noun learn a foreign language
• ? verb adverb live dangerously
• ? verb preposition noun come to an agreement
• ?adverb and adjectice highly desirable
• and so on.
• 
  (handout 3 )

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Read text 1 and underline the collocations you
see.
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From the text we have just read can you remember
the missing collocations?