Learner corpora and phraseology

Collocations in Corpus‐Based Language Learning Research: Identifying, Comparing, and Interpreting the Evidence

“…As mentioned above, one of the major differences between L1 and L2 collocational production was related to the proportion of collocations with high MI‐score values (the values were established on the basis of reference corpora such as the BNC). Compared to L1 users, collocations found in L2 production were more likely to appear frequently in the reference corpora and were less strongly associated on the MI‐score; by contrast, L1 users produced more collocations with higher MI‐score values (e.g., Ebeling & Hasselgård, ; Granger & Bestgen, ). As discussed in the section “MI‐score,” the strength in this AM is a result of the interaction of exclusivity and the low frequency of the word co‐occurrence.…”

“…We selected three types of collocations representing a range of constructions that commonly appear in collocational research (Durrant & Schmitt, ; Ebeling & Hasselgård, ; Granger & Bestgen, ; Paquot & Granger, ; Siyanova & Schmitt, ): verb + complementation ( make + sure/decision/point ), adjective + noun ( human + beings/rights/nature ), and adverb + adjective ( vitally/very/really + important ). Due to space constraints, only the results for the first construction, that is, verb + complementation, are presented in Table ; results for the other two structures, which echo the points made here, can be found in Appendix S3 in the Supporting Information online.…”

“…As pointed out, the MI‐score tends to highlight infrequent combinations, whose constituents “may also be infrequent themselves” (Schmitt, , p. 6) and the collocations may be “more specialised” (Ebeling & Hasselgård, , p. 211). These less frequent and more specialized lexical items, which the MI‐score favors, may not be in the lexicon of L2 speakers yet.…”

“…The corpus‐based collocational measures used in these studies are of paramount importance as they directly and significantly affect the findings of these studies and consequently the insights into language learning that they provide. However, while efforts have been made to standardize the conflicting terminology that inevitably arises from such a large body of research (Ebeling & Hasselgård, ; Evert, ; Granger & Paquot, ; Nesselhauf, ; Wray, ), the rationale behind the selection of collocational measures in studies on formulaic development is not always fully transparent and systematic, making findings from different studies difficult to interpret (González Fernández & Schmitt, ). While considerable research in CL has been devoted to a thorough understanding of these measures, their effects, and the distinction between them (e.g., Bartsch & Evert, ), in LLR collocation measures have not yet received a similar level of attention.…”

Collocational Processing in L1 and L2: The Effects of Word Frequency, Collocational Frequency, and Association

“…The corpus‐based association measures used in psycholinguistic studies are likely to directly and significantly affect the findings and, consequently, the insights into language learning and processing (Gablasova et al., 2017) derived through them. Although various studies with a corpus linguistic focus have made efforts to standardize the conflicting terminology (e.g., Ebeling & Hasselgård, 2015; Evert, 2008; Gablasova et al., 2017), the rationales behind the selection of the association measures in psycholinguistic studies have not always been fully transparent and systematic. Despite the availability of many association measures (see comprehensive overviews by Evert, 2005; Pecina, 2009; Wiechmann, 2008), so far, the mutual information measure has been predominantly used in psycholinguistic research either to extract collocations (e.g., Vilkaité, 2016) or to investigate language users’ sensitivity to collocational strength (e.g., Yi, 2018).…”