Abstract
This paper explores the concept of ‘luxury’ by analysing the collocation associated with luxury using web-crawled corpora. First, the frequently occurring nouns modified by luxury were identified and categorized into four groups: ACCOMMODATION, VEHICLE, PRODUCT, and OTHERS. Further examination of these nouns suggests that places or items that incorporate people by being stayed in or worn can convey luxury in comparison to ordinary consumables. Second, the frequently occurring nouns combined with luxury using a coordinating conjunction were identified and categorized into four groups: COMFORT, ELEGANCE, STYLE, and OPULENCE. Combined with the former discussion of integrating people with special places or items as a way of obtaining luxury, it is inferred that these are the qualities people expect to have in order to improve the environment as well as themselves. These analyses were possible because the target noun, luxury, was an abstract noun that indicates ‘a quality’ as well as ‘a mode of being,’ and also luxury has a collocative tendency to modify another noun. This enabled us to extract common nouns that were the generic names for items or services that convey luxury to people and abstract nouns that exhibited qualities combined with the target noun. This study contributes both to the investigation of the concept of luxury as well as demonstration of a corpus-based approach using noun collocations.
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Notes
Definitions No. 1 and No. 2 were excluded, as their use is obsolete.
COBUILD and ODE list usage of luxury as an attributive adjective. OED, LDOCE, and OALD do not separately have an adjective usage, but they list ‘luxury + NN’ collocation, which suggests that luxury is used as an adjective or has a collocative nature to make a compound with NN.
The AA, http://www.theaa.com/.
European Hotelstars Union, https://www.hotelstars.eu/.
Further information is available on Sketch Engine https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/ententen-corpus/.
‘Cluster collocations’ is an advanced function of WordSketch. ‘If the cluster collocations option is selected, this setting controls how similar in meaning the collocates must be to include them into the same group.’ See also: https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/user-guide/user-manual/word-sketch/#toggle-id-3.
Kilgarriff et al. (2014) explain how a distribution thesaurus works, using this example: ‘if we find instances of both drink tea and drink coffee, that is one small piece of evidence that tea and coffee are similar. We can say that they ‘share’ the collocate drink (verb), in the OBJECT-OF relation.’
See Statistics used in Sketch Engine: https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/documentation/statistics-used-in-sketch-engine.
For this advanced search, we set the ‘maximum number of items in a grammatical relation’ as ‘25’ and ‘minimum similarity between cluster item’ as ‘0.2.’
The logDice score was calculated according to the following formula:
$$ 14 + \log_{2} {\text{Dice}}\left( {\frac{{\left\| {w_{1} ,R,w_{2} } \right\|}}{{\left\| {w_{1} ,R, * } \right\|}},\frac{{\left\| {w_{1} ,R,w_{2} } \right\|}}{{\left\| { * ,R,w_{2} } \right\|}}} \right) = 14 + \log_{2} \frac{{2 \cdot \left\| {w_{1} ,R,w_{2} } \right\|}}{{\left\| {w_{1} ,R, * } \right\| + \left\| { * ,R,w_{2} } \right\|}}. $$CQL term ‘“luxury” “good|item” “such” “as”’ was searched with the default attribute being ‘lemma.’ Then, a noun or noun phrase occurring next to good(s) or item(s) on the right side were examined and counted manually.
There was also an example of Dior perfume product, but this was excluded from the result, as this case could be counted as a noun phrase of ‘product’ rather than ‘perfume.’
For Analysis 2, a luxury and luxuries were also used.
For Analysis 2, frequencies were treated primarily rather than the logDice Score, while Analysis 1 used the logDice Score. The reason for this inconsistency is that the frequencies for nouns combined with luxury were smaller and if treated with the logDice Score, the top-ranked nouns would tend to be ones with far lower frequencies. However, results using the logDice Score were also examined later in this paper.
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The author wishes to express her appreciation to Dr. Atsuko Umesaki and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that improved an earlier version of this manuscript.
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Kondo, Y. A Corpus-Based Study of the Concept of ‘Luxury’ Using Web-Crawled Corpora, enTenTen 2013 and ukWaC. Corpus Pragmatics 3, 1–20 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-018-0044-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-018-0044-0