Many shades of Europe
Résumé
The adage of Firth that « you shall know a word by the company it keeps », is much cited, but the full implications of what he says are not always understood. Collocation is too often seen as something static, just a relationship between two words, but Firth points to something much more than that, as studies from Phillips (1985) to Williams (1998, 2002) have amply shown. The big problem with collocation is that it has always been with us, but we simply did not know it. It has taken big corpora and the insights of Sinclair (1996) to show how important is the idiom principle. What is more, there is often a strange confusion between collocation studies and the phenomenon itself. The former has been with us for some 80 odd years, since the publication of Palmer's second report (Palmer 1933), the latter, the phenomenon of collocation, is part of language, and has thus existed as long as the human speech faculty, and maybe before.
This text does not seek to give a history of collocation, or even to discuss functional collocation, that is to say the phraseologically restricted forms generally entered in dictionaries. What this text does seek to do is to bring together two threads of research in contextualist collocation - collocational networks and collocational resonance - as well as with the technique of lexicographical prototypes so as to show their applications in solving some of the problems facing lexicography in general and e-lexicography in particular.
The text will briefly deal with some problems facing lexicography and then showing how the techniques of collocational networks, collocational resonance and lexicographical prototypes have evolved. It then describes a case study of political representations of Europe.
Loading...