This paper is concerned with the ability of lexical semantic classes to predict the behavior of argument structures in productively selecting novel lexical material. It will be argued that while lexical semantic classes can explain a great deal about the spectrum of potential arguments and resulting entailments for those arguments, constructions which are synonymous from a formal semantic persp...

This article focuses on ongoing work done for Portuguese concerning the phenomenon of lexical co-occurrence known as collocation (cf. Cruse, 1986, inter al.). Instances of the syntactic variety formed by noun plus adjective have been especially observed. Collocational instances are not lexical entries, and thus should not be stored in the lexicon as multiword lexical units. Their processing can...

Lewis (1993) recognized significance of word combinations including collocations by presenting lexical approach. Because of the crucial role of collocation in vocabulary acquisition, this research set out to evaluate the rate of collocations in Iranian EFL learners' writing production across L1 and L2. In addition, L1 interference with L2 collocational use in the learner' writing samples was st...

Semiotic interpretation of lexical cohesion is a major research challenge both in theoretical and applied linguistics. From the point of view of usagebased language description, individual lexical units can be roughly characterized by their collocation profiles, i.e., by collections of condensed usage patterns extracted from very large corpora. It is posited that related lexical units tend to s...

WordNet is probably the best known lexical resource in Natural Language Processing. While it is widely regarded as a high quality repository of concepts and semantic relations, updating and extending it manually is costly. One important type of relation which could potentially add enormous value to WordNet is the inclusion of collocational information, which is paramount in tasks such as Machin...

Introduction For many ESL learners, English prepositions pose a perennial problem, partly because the same lexical item -e.g., the word over -can have a variety of functions (as preposition, noun, adverb, adjective and particle (in verb+particle constructions)) and meanings, and partly because of its diversity in collocational properties. With no generalizations emerging, a common learning stra...

This study examines how different dimensions of corpus frequency data may affect the outcome of statistical modeling of lexical items. The corpus used in our analysis is an elderly speaker corpus in its early development, and the target words are temporal expressions, which might reveal how the speech produced by the elderly is organized. We conduct divisive hierarchical clustering based on two...

In this contribution we will argue that negative polarity is a collocational phenomenon that does not follow from other properties of the respective lexical elements. With German data as evidence, we will follow a proposal by van der Wouden and treat Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) as collocates which must be licensed by abstract semantic properties of their contexts. Using a collocation module ...

We describe sister machine translation prototypes, Ntran, an English to Japanese system developed at UMIST, and Aidtrans, Japanese to English, at Sheffield, both designed for use by an English monolingual. Aidtraus uses extensive and sophisticated collocational analysis radically to reduce the need for conventional post-editing. Ntran offers interactive query at three stages: on-line dictionary...