What is a word?

• What is the relationship between a word form and a token?

• Provide an example to illustrate what we mean by a lemma

Collocation

• What does the following set of contrasting sentences illustrate?

  • His mouth watered.

  • His eyes watered.

  • The roast was mouth-watering.

  • *The [smokey] nightclub was eye-watering.

• Provide an example of a collocational constraint at work.

• At the end of this lesson are concordance excerpts for several of 'mystery words', where the node word has been deleted. Be prepared to make reasonable guesses for what the node word is, and provide collocational evidence from at least three lines from the excerpt.

Example: Schutze's 'Dimensions of meaning'

• Recall Schutze's work which took two common content words, say 'sport' and 'cash', and recorded the number of collocations a bunch of other word forms had with each of them in a large corpus. Schutze calls the space that emerges 'semantic space'. Name a word you might expect to be nearer to 'sport' than 'cash'. Explain briefly why.

Computer analysis of collocation.

• What is a corpus?

• Describe briefly how the span in the illustration relates to the node.

• What is the span/node arrangement in the illustration used for?

Lexis, collocation, and corpus studies.

• Describe breifly how a lexicalist approach differs from a traditional grammatical approach.