Title: Twin Lexical Collocations in Legal Late Middle English (1)
Abstract: ABSTRACT The aim of this study is an attempt to examine occurrence and expansion of clusters (collocations) in legal late Middle English and to determine whether or not these multi-word are recurrent, cohesive, and domain-dependent clusters. The definition and categorisation of collocations are analysed on basis of statistical probability of co-occurrence of some vocabulary (textual perspective). For this purpose non-technical English texts of late Middle English were chosen that provided us common corpus that operated as point of reference. Likewise smaller body of legal texts of same period was collected. The WordSmith program was used to create word lists of two corpora and compute key of legal corpus. This study concentrates on twin collocations (e.g. geue & bequeath) found in first 100 salient of legal corpus as it is assumed here that significantly frequent word in legal corpus plays an important role in collocational patterns. 1. Introduction The access to large amounts of real authentic data in computational lexicography and development of multi-word extraction techniques have made possible growth of corpus-based studies in modern phraseology. Most researchers in this field attempt to solve key problems which multi-word expressions present in applications of modern intercultural communication, professional translation, natural language generation, computational lexicography, machine translation, etc. In contrast, study of multi-word in earlier periods of languages has attracted less attention, particularly because range of applications is also more limited. However, it is essential to investigate origin and development of modern multi-word in order to understand process of their formation and function. The specific purpose here is an attempt to scrutinise occurrence and expansion of clusters (collocations) in legal late Middle English and to determine whether or not these multi-word are recurrent, cohesive, and domain-dependent clusters, as Smadja (1993: 143) claims in case of modern English. Collocations are included in complex and imprecise area of multi-word expressions, which have been studied from various theoretical perspectives and different purposes. The definition and categorisation of collocations are still controversial. Thus, emphasis may be given to (a) statistical probability of co-occurrence of some vocabulary (textual perspective); (b) syntactic and semantic rules which govern association of these (Grossmann and Tutin 2003; Choueka 1988; Gitsaki 1996; Mel'cuk 1988); or (c) pragmatic and rhetorical functions of which co-occur (Moon 1994; Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992: 36; Gledhill 2000). The present study is formulated within framework of first by categorising collocations in terms of co-occurrence and recurrence. Thus, degree of probability of two or more co-occurring and frequency which these two or more occur in language provide notion of collocation in great number of corpus-based studies. Some of these are summarised as follows: a co-occurrence of (Clear 1993: 277); recurrent of that co-occur more often than expected (Smadja 1993: 143); arbitrary and word combination (Benson 1990: 23); a sequence of that occurs more than once in identical form (Kjellmer 1987: 133); the way individual co-occur others (Lewis 1993: 93). This statistical is already perceived in Halliday's characterization of collocation as syntagmatic association of items (1961: 276). Firth's lexical composition approach (1951 [1957]: 196) is illustrated by Gitsaki as follows: words receive their meaning from they co-occur with (1996: 10). …
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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