,Chapter 6: Collocations Abstract One of the most important developments in the study of vocabulary has been the neoFirthian approach to word meaning. Firth (1935) argued that the meaning of a word is as much a matter of how it combines with other words in...
More
,Chapter 6: Collocations Abstract One of the most important developments in the study of vocabulary has been the neoFirthian approach to word meaning. Firth (1935) argued that the meaning of a word is as much a matter of how it combines with other words in actual use (i.e. its collocations) as it is of the meaning it possesses in itself. So, in the Firthian view, bark is part of the meaning of dog, and vice-versa, by dint of their high probability of co-occurrence in texts (Firth 1951,19). Dog and bark collocate significantly, cat and bark are not likely to do so to any significant extent. This chapter aims to provide a critical account of corpus-based collocation research. Following this brief introduction, Section 2 explores the state of the art in collocation research, on the basis of which Section 3presents across-linguistic study of the collocational behavior and semantic prosodies of a group of near synonyms in English and Chinese. Section 4 concludes the chapter by summarizing t
Less
