Article published in:
Patterns, meaningful units and specialized discoursesEdited by Ute Römer and Rainer Schulze
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13:3] 2008
► pp. 351–367
N-grams in comparable specialized corpora
Perspectives on phraseology, translation, and pedagogy
Pierfranca Forchini | Catholic University of Milan
This paper investigates the idiom principle realized as four-word phrases (4-grams) headed by prepositions in specialized corpora
in English and Italian. Concentrating on at the end of, it reports that the collocates of at the end
of regard time, and that apparently synonymic 4-grams are not used in the same contexts. It then explores
realizations of at the end of in a specialized comparable corpus of Italian. Two findings emerge: firstly, that
the most obvious equivalent, alla fine d*, occurs more frequently than in the English corpus;
secondly, this n-gram is frequently used, but has weaker collocational relations, and several synonymic 3-grams share its
collocates. This invites contrastive research on lexical variation and repetition and on the strength of collocations of
multi-word units in English and Italian. Lastly, the paper recounts an experiment with students who gained awareness of language
by concentrating on phraseology in comparable corpora.
Keywords: idiom principle, contrastive phraseology, n-grams, prepositions, specialized corpora, collocation
Published online: 17 September 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.13.3.06for
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.13.3.06for
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