From collocation to colligation

Jiajin XUBeijing Foreign Studies University

类联接

2

Key points

• Colligation• From ‘c’ to ‘g’

• Aspects of English colligation• From Firth to Hoey

• Colligator: A colligation query tool

3

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

decisio

n

L1 make R1

decisio

n

R3 R4 R5L5 L4 L3

NN

1 L1 VV0 R1

NN

1 R3 R4 R5

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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.

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• 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…

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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.

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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, 1

995, 2002; 濮建忠， 2003a; 孙海燕 , 2004; 孙海燕、陈永捷 , 2006);

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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 fu

nctions. • Time nouns (e.g. years, days) tend to appear at the beginning p

art of a text.• “It is reported” structure

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The case of ‘I think’

I think NP + VP

SO

THAT + NP + VP

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• 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.

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Lexico-grammatical choice & chain

• By doing so, we have actually expanded our observation of syntagmatic patterning to both syntagmatic and paradigmatic patterning.

I think NP + VP

SO

THAT + NP + VP

chain

choice

Syn-

Para-

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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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ReferencesAarts, J. & S. Granger. 1998. Tag sequences in learner corpora: A key to interlanguage grammar

and discourse. In S. Granger (ed.). Learner English on Computer. London: Longman.Baker, P., A. Hardie & A. McEnery. 2006. A Glossary of Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.Biber, D., & R. Reppen. 1998. Comparing native and learner perspectives on English grammar: A

study of complement clauses. In Granger, S. (ed.). Learner English on Computer. London: Longman, 145-158.

Firth, J. 1957/1968. A synopsis of linguistic theory, 1930-55. Studies in linguistic analysis (Special Volume of the Philological Society), 1957. Reprinted in F. Palmer. Selected Papers of J. R. Firth 1952-59. London and Harlow: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 168-205.

Francis, G., S. Hunston & E. Manning. 1996. Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs. London: HarperCollins.

Francis, G., S. Hunston & E. Manning. 1998. Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns 2: Nouns and Adjectives. London: HarperCollins.

Gabrielatos, C. 2007. If-conditionals as modal colligations: A corpus-based investigation. In M. Davies, P. Rayson, S. Hunston & P. Danielsson (eds.). Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference: Corpus Linguistics 2007. Birmingham: University of Birmingham.

Hoey, M. & M. O’Donnell. 2008. Lexicography, grammar, and textual position. International Journal of Lexicography 21: 293-309.

Hoey, M. 2002. Textual colligation: A special kind of lexical priming. In K. Aijmer & B. Altenberg (eds.). Language and Computers, Advances in Corpus Linguistics. Papers from the 23rd International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 23), Göteborg 22-26 May 2002. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 171-194.

Hunston, S. & G. Francis. 2000. Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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ReferencesMindt, D. A corpus-based grammar for ELT. In B. Kettleman & G. Marko (eds.).

Teaching and Learning by Doing Corpus Analysis. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.Mindt, D. 1995. An Empirical Grammar of the English Verb: Modal Verbs. Berlin:

Cornelsen,.Tono, Y. 1999. A corpus-based analysis of interlanguage development: Analysing part-

of-speech tag sequences of EFL learner corpora. In B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk & P. Melia (eds.). PALC’99: Practical Applications in Language Corpora. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 323-340.

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Thank You!

Xu Jiajin