Gitsaki, Christina 1996 The development of ESL
collocational knowledge.
An interesting feature of the
collocational behaviour of the verb achieve, which is revealed from its word sketch, is that it collocates frequently with signalling nouns (Flowerdew, 2006) indicating goal or target (e.g.
2000: "
Collocational Frameworks in Medical Research Papers: A Genre-Based Study." English for Specific Purposes 19: 63-86.
The presence of
collocational phrases, such as weak and insignificant, power and control, pain and weakness, anger and frustration, and cycle of violence indicate signs of a mature 18-year-old ESL student-writer.
They allow looking into linguistic phenomena quantitatively, since language change can be a quantitatively verifiable process (from lists of frequencies to lists of
collocational patterns, for instance).
The depth dimension refers to various levels of knowledge (Wesche & Paribakht) and is also associated with various kinds of knowledge such as knowledge of pronunciation, spelling, meaning, register, and frequency, as well as morphological, syntactic, and
collocational properties (Qian).
Using corpus linguistic methods to study its
collocational behavior, key features of the syntax and semantics of lifelong learning are compared with the behavior of the word "learning" as it occurs in general use, and the sociocultural connotations of these features are interpreted and compared with the assumptions of human capital theory.
In such a comparison, students value the
collocational strength of the preposition with for the construction, in opposition to address, which does not demand the colligation.
He then shows how corpora can serve as rich sources of
collocational information that can in turn be used to illuminate and explain to learners the connotative ramifications of word choice in English.
Future comparative studies across these soft-applied sciences should confirm whether the linguistic preferences in terms of syntactic positions, recurring lexical choices and
collocational units of stance adjectives commented above are significant in a larger corpus.