Re: [Corpora-List] Frequency list of phrasal verbs in English

From: William Mann (bill_mann@sil.org)
Date: Fri Oct 03 2003 - 16:47:11 MET DST

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    Dear Mark:

    Two resources come to mind immediately:

    There is a dictionary of Collocations of English, from Longman's. It is a
    couple of inches thick and should provide a much larger stock of cases for
    your study.

    The work of Igor Melcuk, a Russian linguist now working in Canada, provides
    a systematics of collocations. See his home page:
    http://www.fas.umontreal.ca/ling/olst/melcuk/

     Using his approach to lexical functions, you can identify 50 or more
    categories, and you can generate unlisted cases that are ordinary productive
    parts of English.

    On his home page he lists this:

     I. Mel'cuk (1998) Collocations and Lexical Functions. In A.P. Cowie (ed.):
    Phraseology. Theory, Analysis, and Applications, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
    23-53.

    Happy studies.

    Bill Mann

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Mark Davies" <Mark_Davies@byu.edu>
    To: <corpora@hd.uib.no>
    Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 9:12 AM
    Subject: [Corpora-List] Frequency list of phrasal verbs in English

    | I'm looking for frequency listings of phrasal verbs in English (preferably
    in electronic form). I'm aware of the thread on phrasal verbs on CORPORA
    this past May, but that referred mainly to the methodological issue of how
    to count phrasal verbs, rather than pointers to actual lists.
    |
    | I've created a very basic list based on the BNC, but it is only a very
    initial attempt. I have a relational database containing the frequency of
    all of the bigrams in the BNC (along with their POS and lemma), and ran a
    query to match this up with a list of about 7000 phrasal verbs.
    |
    | The problem is that while it could count cases like "let down", "letting
    down", etc for each of the 7000 phrasal verbs, it couldn't handle
    discontinuous units ("Bill let THE OTHERS down on the project"), or
    non-opaque uses of the same phrases ("Bill let the others DOWN THE SIDE of
    the wall"). These are some of the issues raised in the previous thread on
    CORPORA.
    |
    | Anyway, my hope is that someone else might have already created such a
    frequency list, taking into account discontinuous units and non-opaque uses.
    I'd appreciate any pointers to such a list, and would be happy to summarize
    the responses, if there is sufficient interest. Thanks in advance.
    |
    | Mark Davies
    | Brigham Young University
    | http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu
    |
    |



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