The shapes of collocation

The tool GraphColl (Brezina et al. 2015) allows collocational networks to be identified within corpora, enabling corpus analysis to go beyond two-way collocation. This paper aims to illustrate the types of linguistic relationships that can appear when more than two words are considered, using graph theory to account for the different types of collocational “shapes” that can be formed within GraphColl networks. Using the reference corpus, the BE06, examples of different types of graphs were obtained and analysed in order to form an understanding of the sorts of relationships between words that occur in particular shapes. The analysis indicates that concepts from graph theory can be usefully integrated into corpus analysis of collocation as well as showing the potential for a more sophisticated understanding of the company that words keep.

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