| Abstract |
Collocation is increasingly recognised as a central aspect of language, a fact that English learners' dictionaries have responded to extensively. Statistical measures for identifying collocations in large corpora are now well-established. We move on to a further issue: which words have a particularly strong tendency to occur in collocations, or are most 'collocational', and thereby merit having their collocates shown in dictionaries. We propose a measure of collocationality based on entropy, as defined in Information Theory. We describe experiments to find the most collocational words in the British National Corpus, present results with the most collocational nouns and verbs in relation to the grammatical relation OBJECT, and compare the results to collocational words identified in Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners. |
| BibTex |
@InProceedings{ELX06-122,
author = {Adam Kilgarriff},
title = {Collocationality (and how to measure it) },
pages = {997-1004},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th EURALEX International Congress},
year = {2006},
month = {sep},
date = {6-9},
address = {Torino, Italy},
editor = {Elisa Corino, Carla Marello, Cristina Onesti},
publisher = {Edizioni dell'Orso},
isbn = {88-7694-918-6},
} |
