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Collocations in context: a new perspective on collocation networks

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2015
<mark>Journal</mark>International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Issue number2
Volume20
Number of pages35
Pages (from-to)139-173
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The idea that text in a particular field of discourse is organized into lexical patterns, which can be visualized as networks of words that collocate with each other, was originally proposed by Phillips (1983). This idea has important theoretical implications for our understanding of the relationship between the lexis and the text and (ultimately) between the text and the discourse community/the mind of the speaker. Although the approaches to date have offered different possibilities for constructing collocation networks, we argue that they have not yet successfully operationalized some of the desired features of such networks. In this study, we revisit the concept of collocation networks and introduce GraphColl, a new tool developed by the authors that builds collocation networks from user-defined corpora. In a case study using data from McEnery’s (2006a) study of the Society for the Reformation of Manners Corpus (SRMC), we demonstrate that collocation networks provide important insights into meaning relationships in language.

Bibliographic note

Date of Acceptance: 26/3/2015