Colligational effects of collocation

Previous research into lexical constellations has uncovered the existence of dependency relations among different collocations of a word (Cantos & Sánchez 2001; Almela 2011; Almela et al. 2011; Almela 2014). Such dependencies are obtained when the strength of the attraction between a node and one or more of its collocates is contingent on their co-occurrence with a third element (a co-collocate). For instance, the probability that face (verb) collocates with decision is increased by the presence of modifiers of a specific semantic type (e.g., hard, difficult, tough) but weakened by the presence of other types of modifiers such as wise, informed, rational, etc. Implications of this phenomenon for the analysis of word meaning and for the notion of ‘collocation’ have been examined in previous studies. With this chapter we attempt to explore the possibility of extending the notion of co-collocation – and the methodology associated with it– to the analysis of some aspects of colligational priming (Hoey 2005). We hypothesize that the strength of attraction between a lexical item and a grammatical slot can be influenced (strengthened or weakened) by the instantiation of other colligations of the same node in the same syntagmatic environment, and that it is possible to capture these dependencies between colligations by adapting the methodology of co-collocation analysis. We are also interested in determining whether these phenomena of dependency interact with collocational primings. The study will be focused on the relationship of particular collocations and syntactic preferences of the noun CAUSE. Using data from a large English web corpus, we will analyze the association between specific collocations of verbs with CAUSE as object and their impact on the co-occurrence probability of two different types of modifiers: premodifiers and of-headed prepositional postmodifiers. The results suggest that the strength of association between these two modifiers in the context of CAUSE is influenced by the type of verbal collocate.