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Article published In: Constructions in Applied Linguistics
Edited by Susan Hunston and Florent Perek
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 24:3] 2019
► pp. 385–412

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15 years of collostructions

Some long overdue additions/corrections (to/of actually all sorts of corpus-linguistics measures)

 | University of California, Santa Barbara | Justus Liebig University Giessen
Published online: 27 August 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.00011.gri
Abstract
This paper discusses a variety of potential shortcomings of most of the most widely-used association measures as used in collocation research and collostructional analyses. To address these shortcomings, I then discuss a research program called tupleization, an approach that does away with the usual kinds of information conflation by keeping relevant corpus-linguistic dimensions of information – e.g. frequency, association/contingency, dispersion, entropy, etc. – separate and analyzing them in a multidimensional way; I conclude with pointers towards how these dimensions could, if deemed absolutely necessary, be conflated for the simplest kinds of of rankings as well as strategies for future research.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Problems of association measures and towards the solution of tupleization
    • 2.1AMs and the conflation of frequency and effect size of association/contingency
    • 2.2AMs and type frequencies/distributions
    • 2.3Directionality of AMs
    • 2.4Underdispersion of co-occurrence data
    • 2.5Against conflation, towards tupleization
  • 3.Case studies of tupleization
    • 3.1A collexeme analysis of the ditransitive
      • 3.1.1A “traditional” collexeme analysis: 1-tuples
      • 3.1.2Separating frequency and association/contingency: 2-tuples
      • 3.1.3Adding dispersion to frequency and association: 3-tuples
      • 3.1.4Distinguishing directions of association: 4-tuples
    • 3.2A collexeme analysis of the imperative
    • 3.3A distinctive-collexeme analysis of transitive phrasal verbs
    • 3.4A brief discussion of type-token distributions and entropies
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
    • 4.1Interim summary
      • 4.1.1What does G2 (or pFYE) actually do?
      • 4.1.2What if one really needs a one-dimensional ranking?
    • 4.2Where to go from here
  • References
References (46)
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