Measuring associations between constructions and lexical elements: Collostructional analysis

Hilpert, Martin

doi:10.1075/hcp.43.15hil

In:Corpus Methods for Semantics: Quantitative studies in polysemy and synonymy
Edited by Dylan Glynn and Justyna A. Robinson
[Human Cognitive Processing 43] 2014
► pp. 391–404

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Collostructional analysis

Measuring associations between constructions and lexical elements

Martin Hilpert | Université de Neuchâtel

Published online: 6 November 2014

https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.43.15hil

This chapter offers a practical introduction to a set of corpus-linguistic analytical methods that are referred to collectively as ‘collostructional analysis’. The overarching aim in conducting a collostructional analysis is to find out which lexical items form collocations with a given grammatical construction. The purpose of such an undertaking, in the context of this book, is to facilitate the semantic analysis of grammatical constructions. The chapter discusses several case studies in order to show that the semantic description of grammatical constructions benefits from a quantitative analysis of the lexical material that occurs with the respective constructions. A final discussion surveys advantages and pitfalls of collostructional methods.

Keywords: collocations, quantitative analysis

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