For teaching of collocations no resource exists that comprehensively ranks collocations in terms of usefulness for learners. Towards developing a method to produce such a resource, we define a collocation's utility in terms of its unpredictability; the inability of a student to derive the meaning of the collocation from her semantic knowledge of its constituent words. We conduct an experiment c...

As spoken language unfolds over time the speech input transiently activates multiple candidates at different levels of the system - phonological, lexical, and syntactic - which in turn leads to short-lived between-candidate competition. In an fMRI study, we investigated how different kinds of linguistic competition may be modulated by the presence or absence of a prior context (Tyler 1984; Tyle...

The journal editors and the Department of English Studies at the Universitat Jaume I wish to pay tribute to our colleague, friend and teacher, Dr. Xavier Campos Vilanova who passed away earlier this year. Xavier showed a passionate enthusiasm for the study of the history of the English language and literature, but also for everything he did. From taking photographs, researching on the meaning o...

Over the past two decades or so, Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs; also called Multi-word Units) have been an increasingly important concern for Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The term MWE has been used to refer to various types of linguistic units and expressions, including idioms, noun compounds, phrasal verbs, light verbs and other habitual collocations. However...

This study investigated whether verbs in figurative language activate different types of associations than do verbs in literal language. In a sentence-priming experiment, we compared sentences featuring verbs in idiomatic phrases with control sentences in which the same verbs were meant literally. Participants made lexical decisions about nouns that were associated with either the verb’s litera...