Beyond base and collocate
Exploring the effect of second-order collocation on the distribution of support verbs
Support verb constructions figure among the most frequently investigated topics in the literature on collocation.
So far, most studies of this kind have focused on bipartite structures, consisting of a verbal collocate and a nominal base.
Accordingly, the analysis of how support verbs are distributed has concentrated almost exclusively on the lexical control exerted
by the base. In this article, we draw attention towards the influence exerted by the participation of verb and noun in more
complex patterns of lexical co-occurrence. We contend that the distribution of the support verb collocate is contingent not only
on the base noun but also on other elements of the lexical context. This highlights the need to enrich the theoretical framework
of collocation analysis with the additional descriptive category of ‘second-order collocate’. The proposal is illustrated with two
case studies using a large-scale web corpus of English.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.From binary to ternary structures
- 3.Obtaining second-order collocates
- 3.1Statistical filters
- 3.2Recursivity
- 3.3Syntactic filters
- 3.4Semantic filters
- 4.Two case studies on support verb constructions
- 4.1Method
- 4.2Results
- 4.2.1Case Study 1: Decision
- 4.2.2Case study 2: Cattention
- 4.3Discussion
- 5.Conclusions
- Notes
-
References