This paper explores the collocational behaviour and semantic prosody of near synonyms from a cross-linguistic perspective. The importance of these concepts to language learning is well recognized. Yet while collocation and semantic prosody have recently attracted much interest from researchers studying the English language, there has been little work done on collocation and semantic prosody on ...

Two experiments examined the effects of phonotactic probability and neighborhood density on word learning by 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. Nonwords orthogonally varying in probability and density were taught with learning and retention measured via picture naming. Experiment 1 used a within-story probability/across-story density exposure context. Experiment 2 used an across-story probability...

This paper investigates patterns of rhetorical convergence and divergence in pairs of RA abstracts (English-Spanish and Spanish-English) published in the journal Ibérica. To that end, a total of 84 pairs of author-translated RA abstracts were analyzed. Based on the results of a pilot study, the following rhetorical patterns were analyzed in the corpus: text-referring expressions, degree of epis...

Automatic sense-tagging is one of the next challenges that corpus linguists have to face. So far, results are modest, despite numerous efforts, and sense-tagging appears as a vexing task. Difficulties stem from various sources, and in particular the extraction of disambiguating information from the context. However, one of the main problems comes upstream of the disambiguating process and lies ...

We propose a novel dual processing model of linguistic routinisation, specifically formulaic expressions (from relatively fixed idioms, all the way through to looser collocational phenomena). This model is formalised using the Dynamic Syntax (DS) formal account of language processing, whereby we make a specific extension to the core DS lexical architecture to capture the dynamics of linguistic ...