Introduction to Corpus Linguistics: Colligation John Corbett & Wendy Anderson

This session Understanding colligation Understanding the difference between collocation and colligation Doing colligation searches

Collocation and colligation ‘Collocation’ considers the relationship between words/lemmas: ‘coherence’ collocates: lexical items such as ‘terror’, ‘reign’, ‘war’, ‘Red’, ‘Mau Mau’, etc. ‘neighbourhood/horizon’ collocates: frequently occurring grammatical items such as ‘the’, ‘this’, ‘my’, ‘of’ ‘on’ ‘against’ etc. ‘Colligation’ considers the relationship between words/lemmas and grammatical categories, eg ‘different’ + [preposition/conjunction] or [adjective] + [preposition]

Devising search tools… Free skiing is very different ______ traditional skiing. What part of speech is most likely to fill this slot? Are there differences in Br. Eng and Am. Eng? What do you think?

A prescriptive guide…www.dailywritingtips.com We all have our pet grammar peeves, usages that, when we hear them, affect us like the sound of a fingernail against a chalkboard. I’ll bet I’m not the only one who shudders to hear sentences like these: A boxer is different than a Doberman. This car is different to that one. Yet, are these usages really incorrect?

A prescriptive guide…www.dailywritingtips.com Yet, are these usages really incorrect? According to the entry for different from, different to, different than at Bartleby.com, these three have been usage items for many years. All are Standard and have long been so (different to is limited to British English, however), but only different from seems never to meet objections. How would you check frequency of usage with a corpus? And how would you check American and UK usage?

Different ways of searching for colligates

Two paths to the same results…

But what about ‘than’?

Comparing frequencies of prep + conj

Comparing BNC (remember to normalise)

Has ‘different than’ become more common?

Results

Conclusions Different from is still the preferred usage in the UK and USA. Different to is a possible variant in the UK. (In the US it is much less frequent, though we find ‘embedded’ examples like ‘X means something different to Y’) Different than is much less frequent; it does not appear in the results but a specific search will find it. The TIME corpus shows its use is increasing, and that it is often used when introducing a subordinate clause: ‘X is no different than it was when x…’

More extensive research with colligation… Dee Gardner and Mark Davies (2007) ‘Pointing Out Frequent Phrasal Verbs: A Corpus Based Analysis’ TESOL Quarterly Vol. 41, No.2, June pp. 339-359

Research questions… Which phrasal verbs (or multi-word verbs) are most common in English? Which are the most productive lexical verbs? Which are the most productive particles? Which are the commonest combinations? How does the article Gardner and Davies (2007) answer them?