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Article published In: Constructions and Frames
Vol. 7:1 (2015) ► pp.1–46

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Lectal constraining of lexical collocations

How a word’s company is influenced by the usage settings

 | University College Leuven
 | KU Leuven, Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics
Published online: 28 January 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.7.1.01tum
Adopting a corpus-based approach, lexical collocations are reconsidered from a lectal perspective. Analyzing adjective-noun collocations, it will be shown that lexical collocations are conditioned by the language settings in which they are used. These lectal constraints do not only apply to lexical collocations as a measure of lexical association but also to their potential function as a determinant of other constructions. These results argue for the inclusion of the heterogeneity of the corpus settings in empirical linguistic models and for the integration of a full-fledged lectal dimension in theoretical frameworks advocating a usage-based methodology, such as construction grammar.
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