| Abstract |
Lexicography is basically concerned with the meaning and use of words. In previous decades, lexicographers have investigated the meanings of words and synonyms, but recent lexicographic research has been extended using corpus-based techniques to study the way that words are used and, in particular, how lexical associations are used. Lexicography is, therefore, directly connected to phraseology because both disciplines study sets of fixed expressions (idioms, phrasal verbs, etc.) and other types of multi-word lexical units. This paper presents an overview of two major corpora (CEUNF and COEPROF) compiled for phraseological and lexicographical purposes: the use of lexical bundles in the writing of Spanish university students. Both the CEUNF and the COEPROF have been used to analyze the production of phraseological units (lexical bundles and grammatical collocations) present in argumentative texts written in English by Spanish EFL university students. This study, based on corpus linguistics (McEnery, Xiao & Tono, 2006), phraseology (Cowie, 1998; Howarth, 1996, 1998; McCarthy & O’Dell, 2005, Nesselhauf, 2003, 2005; Granger & Meunier, 2008) and lexicography (Atkins & Rundell, 2008; Bergenholtz et al., 2009; Hartmann, 2001, 2003; Nielsen, 2009: Ooi, 1998), uses two taxonomies taken from Biber et al. (1999) for the lexical bundles (linking and stance lexical bundles) and Benson et al. (1986, 1993) for the grammatical collocations (verbs of communication and mental processes). With these two taxonomies a bilingual list of phraseological units in Spanish and English will be devised in order to contrastively analyze the production of such units by both non-native students and professionals writing in English and with the ultimate goal of designing a lexicographical glossary of bilingual lexical units used in argumentative English writing. For the preliminary quantitative analysis of the data and word searching Wordsmith Tools (Wordlist and Collocates tools) has been used. The analysis of these initial data and the use of the appropriate statistical tools (norming of words, T-test for the statistical significance, etc.) may be seen as a starting point for producing a glossary of lexical items in argumentative writing and improved teaching material for Spanish university learners of English. |
| BibTex |
@InProceedings{ELX12-025,
author = {Juan-Pedro Rica-Peromingo},
title = {Corpus-based lexicography: an initial step for designing a bilingual glossary of lexical units in English and in Spanish},
pages = {404--412},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th EURALEX International Congress},
year = {2012},
month = {aug},
date = {7-11},
address = {Oslo,Norway},
editor = {Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld and Julie Matilde Torjusen},
publisher = {Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo},
isbn = {978-82-303-2228-4},
} |
