Idioms and Collocations

This book demonstrates how corpus-based research can advance the understanding of linguistic phenomena in a given language. By presenting a detailed analysis of collocations and idioms in a digital corpus of English and German, the contributors to this volume show how the use of collocations and idioms has changed over time, and suggests possible triggers for this change. The book not only examines what these collocations and idioms are, but also what their purpose is within languages. Idioms and Collocations is divided into three sections. The first section discusses the construction, composition and annotation of the corpus. Chapters in the second section describe the methods for querying the corpus, the generation and maintenance of the example subcorpora, and the linguistic-lexicographic analyses of the target idioms. Finally, the third section presents the results of specific investigations into the syntactic, semantic, and historical properties of collocations. This book presents original work in corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, theoretical linguistics and lexicography. It will be useful for researchers in academic and industrial settings, and lexicographers.