Most of the research conducted into collocation and semantic frames has dealt with these phenomena separately. The study of collocation has not figured prominently in the research agenda of frame semantics, and frame semantics has only sporadically been used as an analytical framework for collocation. This article is a contribution to narrowing the gap between the two fields. It does so by addressing key issues in the design of a frame-based approach to collocation, with a special focus on the relation between collocational patterns and semantic valency, and by providing arguments for the efficacy of the frame-semantic theoretical apparatus in explaining verb-adjective links that are not accounted for by the existing models of collocation. The methodology combines lexicographic resources as well as quantitative and qualitative analysis of examples and data from an English web corpus (ukWaC).
Support verb constructions figure among the most frequently investigated topics in the literature on collocation.
So far, most studies of this kind have focused on bipartite structures, consisting of a verbal collocate and a nominal base.
Accordingly, the analysis of how support verbs are distributed has concentrated almost exclusively on the lexical control exerted
by the base. In this article, we draw attention towards the influence exerted by the participation of verb and noun in more
complex patterns of lexical co-occurrence. We contend that the distribution of the support verb collocate is contingent not only
on the base noun but also on other elements of the lexical context. This highlights the need to enrich the theoretical framework
of collocation analysis with the additional descriptive category of ‘second-order collocate’. The proposal is illustrated with two
case studies using a large-scale web corpus of English.
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