Chapter published in:
Computational Phraseology
Edited by Gloria Corpas Pastor and Jean-Pierre Colson
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 24] 2020
► pp. 151–176

Collecting collocations from general and specialised corpora

A comparative analysis

| Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte, Université de Montréal
| Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte, Université de Montréal

Collocations are increasingly taken into account in general and specialised repositories and methodologies to collect them are heavily based on corpora. However, lexicographers and terminologists use different kinds of corpora in which combinations are likely to behave according to specific rules and/or patterns. This contribution presents a comparative analysis of the collocational behaviour of 15 lexical items found in a general language corpus and a specialised corpus on the theme of the environment. We automatically extracted large sets of collocates (three lists of 50 collocates) for each lexical item and from each corpus and analyse different facets of collocational behaviour: polysemy of lexical items, characteristics of collocates (overlap, rank and semantic classes of collocates, etc.). Our aim is to draw the attention of terminologists and lexicographers to some specific factors affecting the behaviour of collocations in specialized and general corpora.

Keywords: Collocation, terminology, lexicography, specialised corpus, general corpus, semantic class
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Lexical combinations in terminology and lexicography
  • 3.A comparative analysis
    • 3.1Corpora
    • 3.2Lexical items selected
    • 3.3Automated extraction of collocations
  • 4.Observations on the lists of candidate collocations
    • 4.1Overlap of candidate collocates
    • 4.2Rank of candidates
    • 4.3How collocates reveal specific meanings of items
  • 5.Concluding remarks: Summary and guidelines for terminologists and lexicographers
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Funding
  • References
Published online: 08 May 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.24.08lho
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