THE METACONCEPT WORD-COMBINATION AND ITS TRANSFORMATION IN ENGLISH COMPUTER-CORPUS DISCOURSE

THE METACONCEPT WORD-COMBINATION AND ITS TRANSFORMATION IN ENGLISH COMPUTER-CORPUS DISCOURSE

Author:  N.B. Gvishiani

Affiliation:  Lomonosov Moscow State University

Abstract:  The present study focuses on terms and concepts surrounding a wide area of discussion in the field of WORD-COMBINATION as an object of phraseology. Being part of metalanguage, the notion of WORD-COMBINATION is treated as a metaconcept – a multidimensional formation that reflects a totality of single individual concepts and approaches employed in the investigation and description of the object-language phenomena.
A contrastive analysis carried out in the paper covers terminological discourse dealing with word-combinations within the more traditional view in terms of lexical-phraseological categories and the corpus-driven frame-of-reference. The implementation of corpora technologies in the study of WORD-COMBINATION has led to uncovering the functional potential of lexical-grammatical frames through a range of variable collocates.
As a result of the investigation, it transpired that the transformation of the metaconcept under analysis has been brought about by the development of the distributional (frequency-based) approach in corpus linguistics research. The multitude of traditional terms used to describe phrasal units have been ousted by the notions of ‘n-grams’, ‘clusters’ and ‘lexical bundles’. This shift in the methodology has had a considerable effect on the entire frame-of-reference in phraseology. It has been shown that lexical bundles 1) single out the grammatical component in the unfolding of the message; 2) perform the linking and emphasizing functions and 3) ensure a closer contextualization of the speech event. All these features contribute to defining lexical bundles as discourse units.
The applications of lexical bundles in phraseology are considered with reference to the analysis of literary texts (‘corpus stylistics’), a contrastive study of native and non-native academic writing, and comparison of genre features across national languages.

Keywords:  the metaconcept WORD-COMBINATION, lexical-phraseological categories of word-combination, British contextualism, idiomaticity, the distributional (frequency-based) approach in corpus research, n-grams, lexical bundles, discourse unit.

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Pages:  15-25