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May 6, 2009
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This paper offers a state-of-the-art review of the combination of corpora and experimental methods. Using a sample of recent studies, it shows (i) that psycholinguists regularly exploit the benefits of combining corpus and experimental data, whereas corpus linguists do so much more rarely, and (ii) that psycholinguists and corpus linguists use corpora in different ways in terms of the dichotomy of exploratory/descriptive vs. hypothesis-testing as well as the corpus-linguistic methods that are used. Possible reasons for this are suggested and arguments are presented for why (and how) corpus linguists should look more into the possibilities of complementing their corpus studies with experimental data.
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The Deverbal Nominal Construction of modern Italian belongs to a class of phenomena that present interesting theoretical challenges given their ambiguous status between morphological compounding and syntax. In this paper, we combine evidence from corpora and a systematic elicitation experiment to propose that Deverbal Nominal Constructions are actually a spurious class, including both true compounds and constructions that belong to the impoverished syntax of telegraphic language, signs and headlines. Besides providing results that allow us to maintain a stronger view of the separation of morpho-lexical and syntactic phenomena, the study also serves as a general illustration of how empirical methods from corpus analysis and psycholinguistics can be brought to bear on issues of interest to the general theory of language.
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Natural language makes considerable use of formulaic recurrent patterns of words. This paper triangulates the construct of ‘formula’ from corpus linguistic, psycholinguistic and educational perspectives. It describes the corpus linguistic extraction of formulaic sequences from academic speech and writing. It determines English language instructors' explicit evaluations of their pedagogical importance. It summarizes four experiments which show how corpus linguistics metrics of formulaicity affect the accuracy and fluency of processing of these formulas in native speakers. The language processing tasks were selected to sample an ecologically valid range of language processing skills: spoken and written, production and comprehension, form-focused and meaning-focused. Processing in all experiments was affected by various corpus-derived metrics: length, frequency, and mutual information (MI), but for native speakers it is predominantly the MI of the formula which determines processability. The implications of these findings for the psycholinguistic relevance of corpus-derived metrics of formulaic language are discussed.
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This paper aims to provide a theory to help explain the similarities and differences between corpus and elicited data in the area of frequent adjective-noun collocations. The study begins with an overview of existing data and theories from word frequency estimation studies and word association studies. This is followed by a critical analysis of three explanations for elicited-corpus data differences (Sinclair, Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, Oxford University Press, 1991; Bybee and Hopper, Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, John Benjamins, 2001; and Wray, Formulaic Language and the Lexicon, Cambridge University Press, 2002). I then report on an experiment designed to compare British National Corpus (BNC) data and English language teacher intuitions about the most frequent collocates of some very common adjectives in the English language. It is argued that the data provide support for the theory that a key factor affecting the ‘quality’ of lexical intuitions may be the employment of an availability heuristic in judgments of frequency. It is argued that in an elicitation task some collocates of words (particularly those typically occurring together with the stimulus word in a larger language chain) may be more hidden from memory searches than other collocates which tend to occur with the stimulus word as a ‘bare’ dyad in typical usage.
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May 6, 2009
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This paper investigates elicited data from a usage-based perspective. First, elicited data are analyzed for frequent usage collocations. In general, elicited data do not contain these target conversational collocations, and it is argued that a usage-based model, which includes autonomous storage features, predicts this aspect of elicited data. Secondly, the paper explores for a small subset of the elicited data the extent to which speakers employ Idiom Principle or Open Choice processing in completing an elicitation task. Here, again, it is argued that the data are consistent with usage-based model constructs, even in a context where Open Choice processing might be expected.
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It is a by now established fact that idiomaticity cannot be equated with non-compositionality alone, but is a complex concept that is also associated with various aspects of formal flexibility. This raises the question to what extent speakers call up these different factors when judging the overall idiomaticity of a phrase. In the present paper, experimental and corpus-linguistic methodology are combined to address this question. For a total of 39 V NP-idioms of the kind make a point or take the plunge , comprising more than 13,000 tokens obtained from the British National Corpus, their compositionality, syntactic, lexico-syntactic, and morphological flexibility were assessed corpus-linguistically. The corpus-based results thereby obtained were then correlated with native speakers' overall idiomaticity judgments in a multiple regression analysis to determine each factor's impact on the overall judgments. The results indicate that speakers indeed rely on multiple factors simultaneously, with lexico-syntactic and morphological factors being even more important than compositionality, and verb-related being more important than NP-related information. Overall, the results back up the theoretical concept of a collocation-idiom continuum, and demonstrate how various, and sometimes competing, motivations determine a phrase's position on this continuum.
