John Benjamins Publishing Company
Monocollocable words
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František Čermák
Abstract
How often do people, even native speakers, wonder, on hearing a familiar proverb, such as Much Ado about Nothing, what ado in this proverb really means? Most will know the proverb but their knowledge of ado is often restricted to a particular lexical neighbourhood without realising that it is in fact strongly and prohibitively limited to it in this way. It is not common to give much thought to words in combinations and modes of their combination and realise that some, such as auspices, aback, standstill, ado, may not depend on how the speaker would like to use them and what they choose to say but on what the language dictates to users, that is the way how they must be used. This does not mean that there is much liberty in the use of other words either but these limitations are not immediately obvious as in this case: here, words are in their usage severely restricted to one or few more combinations only. These monocollocable words (as they are termed here), to be found, probably, in all languages, are an obstacle in understanding a foreign language, while, on the other hand, textbooks and dictionaries never really give the user much warning that there is a difficulty related to them if these should be used correctly.
Abstract
How often do people, even native speakers, wonder, on hearing a familiar proverb, such as Much Ado about Nothing, what ado in this proverb really means? Most will know the proverb but their knowledge of ado is often restricted to a particular lexical neighbourhood without realising that it is in fact strongly and prohibitively limited to it in this way. It is not common to give much thought to words in combinations and modes of their combination and realise that some, such as auspices, aback, standstill, ado, may not depend on how the speaker would like to use them and what they choose to say but on what the language dictates to users, that is the way how they must be used. This does not mean that there is much liberty in the use of other words either but these limitations are not immediately obvious as in this case: here, words are in their usage severely restricted to one or few more combinations only. These monocollocable words (as they are termed here), to be found, probably, in all languages, are an obstacle in understanding a foreign language, while, on the other hand, textbooks and dictionaries never really give the user much warning that there is a difficulty related to them if these should be used correctly.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword vii
- Introduction 1
- Monocollocable words 9
- Translation asymmetries of multiword expressions in machine translation 23
- German constructional phrasemes and their Russian counterparts 43
- Computational phraseology and translation studies 65
- Computational extraction of formulaic sequences from corpora 83
- Computational phraseology discovery in corpora with the mwetoolkit 111
- Multiword expressions in comparable corpora 135
- Collecting collocations from general and specialised corpora 151
- What matters more: The size of the corpora or their quality? 177
- Statistical significance for measures of collocation strength 189
- Verbal collocations and pronominalisation 207
- Empirical variability of Italian multiword expressions as a useful feature for their categorisation 225
- Too big to fail but big enough to pay for their mistakes 247
- Multi-word patterns and networks 273
- How context determines meaning 297
- Detecting semantic difference 311
- Index 325
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword vii
- Introduction 1
- Monocollocable words 9
- Translation asymmetries of multiword expressions in machine translation 23
- German constructional phrasemes and their Russian counterparts 43
- Computational phraseology and translation studies 65
- Computational extraction of formulaic sequences from corpora 83
- Computational phraseology discovery in corpora with the mwetoolkit 111
- Multiword expressions in comparable corpora 135
- Collecting collocations from general and specialised corpora 151
- What matters more: The size of the corpora or their quality? 177
- Statistical significance for measures of collocation strength 189
- Verbal collocations and pronominalisation 207
- Empirical variability of Italian multiword expressions as a useful feature for their categorisation 225
- Too big to fail but big enough to pay for their mistakes 247
- Multi-word patterns and networks 273
- How context determines meaning 297
- Detecting semantic difference 311
- Index 325
