Current work on lexical collocations uses two ideas: (i) words have distinctive semantic profiles or "prosodies"; and (ii) the strength of association between words can be measured in quantitative terms. These ideas can be combined to provide comparative semantic profiles of words, which show the frequent and characteristic collocates of node words, and make explicit the semantic relations between the collocates.Using data from corpora of up to 120 million words, it is shown that the lemma CAUSE occurs in predominantly "unpleasant" collocations, such as cause of the trouble and cause of death. A case study of this lemma is used to illustrate quantitative methods for investigating collocations. Various methods proposed in the literature are of great practical value in establishing collocational sets, but their theoretical basis is less clear. Brief comparative semantic profiles are given for related lemmas, e.g. REASON and CONSEQUENCE. Implications for the relation between system and use are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.