From collocation to colligation 类联接 From collocation to colligation Jiajin XU Beijing Foreign Studies University

Key points Colligation Aspects of English colligation From ‘c’ to ‘g’ Aspects of English colligation From Firth to Hoey Colligator: A colligation query tool

Colligation: From ‘c’ to ‘g’ Both collocation and colligation tell about the co-occurrence or co-selection. Firth (1957: 182) sees collocation as ‘actual words in habitual company’, and colligation as ‘the interrelation of grammatical categories in syntactical structure’ (ibid: 183). L5 L4 L3 decision L1 make R1 R3 R4 R5 L5 L4 L3 NN1 L1 VV0 R1 R3 R4 R5 Linear units of meaning

Colligation: From ‘c’ to ‘g’ E.g. ‘I watched him’ a [1st person sing. pron.] + [past tense of a transitive verb] + [3rd person sing. pron. in the objective form] (Firth 1957: 181). [Pron.] + [Verb] + [Pron.] Colligation is also applied to phrases or words (Baker et al. 2006: 36). E.g. the word window tends to colligate with prepositions.

Once upon a time, in conclusion, the paper examines… Firth (1957): Interrelation between grammatical categories ↓ Hoey (2005): Textual colligation Lexico-grammar categories are colligated with textual positions. Once upon a time, in conclusion, the paper examines…

Colligation research: an overview Colligational patterns can be summarised by looking at concordance lines. Free hand and Naked eye More often, colligation can be studied with PoS-tagged texts.

Colligation research: an overview Relevant studies 1. Tag sequences/POSgrams & overall patterning: (Aarts & Granger, 1998; Tono, 1999; Hunston & Francis, 2000; 濮建忠, 2003b); 2. Focusing on a particular word class, e.g. verb (e.g. Francis, Hunston & Manning, 1996,1998; Mindt, 1995, 2002; 濮建忠，2003a; 孙海燕, 2004; 孙海燕、陈永捷, 2006);

Colligation research: an overview 3. Focusing on a specialised category, e.g. Biber & Reppen (1998) on complement clause, Gabrielatos (2007) on if conditional, 张军、李文中 (2004) on verb noun colligation, and 梁茂成 (2008) on modal sequences. 4. Hoey (2002): Textual colligation as a special kind of lexical priming (see also Hoey & O’Donnell 2008. ) He argues that some lexis has a preference for certain textual functions. Time nouns (e.g. years, days) tend to appear at the beginning part of a text. “It is reported” structure

The case of ‘I think’

This poses a question as to whether we can examine the different layers of colligational pattern of expressions like “I think” all at a time. This is the primary motivation of our colligation tool—Colligator.

Lexico-grammatical choice & chain Syn- Para- By doing so, we have actually expanded our observation of syntagmatic patterning to both syntagmatic and paradigmatic patterning.

Tasks China in the media: A colligation analysis It is ADJ that: A CIA design Modal colligation of CN EFL learners A quasi-replication of Liang’s study

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Thank You! Xu Jiajin