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Patterned Distribution of Phraseologies within Text: The Case of Research Articles

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Book cover Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts

Part of the book series: New Language Learning and Teaching Environments ((NLLTE))

Abstract

Studies on phraseology originated from Sinclair’s (1991) ‘idiom principle’, which holds that ‘a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments’ (Sinclair, 1991: 110). In this view, the phraseological tendency of language is such that words ‘go together and make meanings by their combinations’ (Sinclair, 2004: 29). It is not difficult to see the link between this view and Firth’s theory of meaning by collocation, which holds that ‘one of the meanings of night is its collocability with dark, and of dark, of course, collocation with night’ (Firth, 1957: 196). Sinclair’s theory was further developed into what is often called corpus-driven linguistics, of which Lexical Priming (Hoey, 2005), Pattern Grammar (Hunston & Francis, 2000), and Semantic Prosody (Louw, 1993) are often thought of as the most important strands.

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Authors
  1. Maocheng Liang
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

    Bin Zou

  2. Coventry University, UK

    Simon Smith

  3. University of Liverpool, UK

    Michael Hoey

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© 2015 Maocheng Liang

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Liang, M. (2015). Patterned Distribution of Phraseologies within Text: The Case of Research Articles. In: Zou, B., Smith, S., Hoey, M. (eds) Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts. New Language Learning and Teaching Environments. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137440037_5

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