Exploiting a Corpus to Compile a Lexical Resource for Academic Writing: Spanish Lexical Combinations

This paper provides insight into ongoing research focusing on the exploitation of Spanish academic corpora in order to build up a lexical tool addressed to novice writers of academic texts. The object of the lexical tool is what we call academic lexical combinations (ALC). By ALC we mean recurrent segments of words that may or may not be semantically compositional and fulfill rhetorical functions such as giving examples, concluding, expressing emphasis, etc. These functions are particularly prominent in academic discourse. ALCs comprise from collocations to idioms as well as formulas, as they are understood in the Meaning-Text Theory (Mel’cuk, 2012). The procedure adopted for the extraction of the ALC from the corpus is described along with how we combine statistical information and native speakers’ intuition. Even if corpora play a leading role in the construction of our lexical tool, we need to filter out corpus output with phraseological criteria, which makes human intervention necessary. Finally, we specify the architecture of the lexical tool and we show different prototype lexicographical entries.

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