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Untypical patterns in translations 105
not able to tell much about the strength of co-occurrence between target word
and its collocates. Another approach, namely tests for statistical significance
that are based on observed and expected frequencies, can be used instead to
measure the strength of association. Although statistical tests (see e.g. Stubbs
1995; Barnbrook 1996) or the whole statistical approach (Kenny 2001) include
problems of their own, they are widely used in corpus linguistics to distinguish
collocations that exist by chance from those whose co-occurrence is statistically
significant. The statistical procedure used in this study is explained in more
detail later in this chapter.
In its narrowest sense, collocation recognises only the lexical associations of
nodes (Sinclair 1991:170). However, the same kind of co-occurrences exist between
node words and grammatical classes. These grammatical collocations are
recognized as colligations. Colligations have, however, originally been defined
as interrelations of grammatical categories, which thus concern categories such
as word classes and sentence classes (Firth 1968: 181; see also Tognini Bonelli
1996:74). In present-day corpus linguistics, however, colligation is understood
to mean an association of a word, “seen as a unique lexical item rather than
as a member of its class” (Tognini Bonelli ibid.), with grammatical categories
(Hoey 1997:8; Sinclair 1998:15) or with a particular position in a sentence
or text (Hoey ibid.; Kennedy 1991 2 ). Both the contextual structures mentioned
here (collocations and colligations) are crucial in the analysis of word meaning.
As Carter puts it, meaning consists of several kinds of inter-relationships:
– the meaning of a ‘word’ cannot really be adequately given without the fullest
possible information concerning the place the word occupies and the contrasts
it develops within a network of differential relations which includes patterns
and ranges and the syntactic patterns which operate within particular ranges.
(Carter 1987:56) 3
Corpus-based analysis of lexical or grammatical patterns suits particularly well
the description of the use of nearly synonymous words (Biber et al. 1998). So
far, however, corpus-based methods have not been widely used for this purpose.
A few studies, though, are available. In their corpus-based presentation
of language structure and use, Biber, Conrad and Reppen (ibid.) clarify the systematic
differences in some groups of synonymous words. For example, nearly
synonymous adjectives big, large and great have clearly different collocational
association patterns in academic prose: big collocates most commonly with
enough, large with number and great with deal. In another example, the synonymous
verbs start and begin are studied, and a similar tendency is observed:
start is more commonly used as an intransitive verb (Blood loss started about the