Collocation and Selectional Preferences: A Frame-based Approach

Abstract

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).