Corpus study of syntagmatic co-occurrence (based on the example of collocations formed by the component professeur)

The syntagmatic (collocation) potential of the French word professeur is analysed. Collocation refers to a combination of two or more lexical units that tend to occur together. This combination is based on the semantic and grammatical interdependence of its constituent elements. Collocations are characterized by stability, recurrence and reproducibility. This paper is realized in course of the corpus linguistics, its methodological base combines the usage of general scientific research methods and techniques (observation, description, classification, comparative analysis), of the method of identifying the collocates using the grammar of lexical and syntactic patterns, the parts of the method of unification of dictionary definitions and the method of complex combinatorial and semantic analysis. The relevance of the study is mainly due to the significance of collocations: they are characteristics of all languages and they have a bright national linguistic specificity. In the paper a method of semantic and syntagmatic analysis of co-occurrence of lexical units is designed. According to it, firstly, the word definitions in several dictionaries were analysed, a unified lexical meaning was formulated, and besides, the collocates of the word were identified from the dictionary entries. Secondly, the usage of the corpus frTenTen17 from the web service Sketch Engine took place. By the method of automatic extraction 713 641 cases of usage of the word were found. They were classified by sketches -lexical and syntactic patterns, that can be ranked according to the indicators of the frequency of mutual occurrence of collocation and of the score (uniqueness). Thirdly, the data from dictionaries and from corpus were compared. It was found that dictionary collocations are only partially confirmed in sketches from the multibillion corpus. At the same time, a set of stable collocations that had not been found in the dictionaries was determined. All this indicates that dictionaries do not sufficiently reflect the real usage of the word in speech. Logical, semantic, co-occurring, stylistic limitations of collocations of the word professeur were revealed. Testing of the service Sketch Engine has displayed a number of shortcomings, which can partly be corrected and which need to be taken into consideration while working with sketches. The practical value of the research also consists in the possibility of applying the results in lexicographic practice and teaching a number of theoretical and practical linguistic disciplines.

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