Collocational deficiency is a pervasive phenomenon in learner English. Language learners often fail to choose the correct combination of two or more words due to their unawareness of collocational properties in vocabulary. They are apt to adopt lexical simplification strategies such as using a synonymous or Ll-influenced expression. This paper presents a corpus-based study on the collocational ...

The purpose of the current study was to explore if and how additional-language learners may show changes in phraseological patterns over course a stay target-language environment. In particular, we focused on noun+adjective combinations produced by group speakers French at three points time, spanning 21 months including an academic year France. We extracted each combination from longitudinal co...

In this paper, we describe an alternative to the kappa statistic for measuring intercoder agreement. We present a model based on the assumption that the observed surface agreement can be divided into (unknown amounts of) true agreement and chance agreement. This model leads to confidence interval estimates for the proportion of true agreement, which turn out to be comparable to confidence inter...

Research hitherto has tended to show that, like vocabulary errors, wrong collocations are often due to transfer from L1, and hence that greater typological difference from the target language leads to more serious collocational errors. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the collocational errors of Swedish and Chinese students. 100 university students from each environment wrote a short essa...

We address the problem of automatically processing collocations—a subclass of multi-word expressions characterized by a high degree of morphosyntactic flexibility—in the context of two major applications, namely, syntactic parsing and machine translation. We show that parsing and collocation identification are processes that are interrelated and that benefit from each other, inasmuch as syntact...

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 ...