Lexical Patterns: from Hornby to Hunston and beyond

Abstract

I start with a brief summary of A. S. Hornby's achievement in creating the Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (ISED 1942), a work which gradually mutated, through many editions, into the present Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English. Among Hornby's radical innovations was a focus on examining the patterned nature of language and presenting patterns of word use in a succinct form for assimilation by language learners. He saw that each verb is associated with a diff erent set of syntactic patterns, and he was able to impose order on apparent chaos by picking out structural threads and establishing templates for pattern analyses. The 5th edition of OALD, edited by Jonathan Crowther (1995) and the 6th edition, edited by Sally Wehmeier (2000) were recensions of Hornby's work using corpus evidence. Hornby and his mentor, H. E. Palmer, had an intuitive understanding of the patterned nature of language, but they lacked the evidence that was necessary for a detailed empirical study of the collocational patterns associated with diff erent meanings of each word. Th is had to wait until the advent of very large corpora, inspired in particular by the vision and practice of J. M. Sinclair. As early as 1966, Sinclair predicted that patterns of lexis ?would not yield to anything less than a very large computer?. Much of his life's work was devoted to developing sound linguistic theory on the basis of empirical analysis of corpus evidence. His principles were taken up by subsequent linguists, for example Alan Partington, Michael Hoey, Susan Hunston, and Gill Francis. In his 1987 paper entitled The nature of the evidence, Sinclair stresses the importance of distinguishing signifi cant collocations from random co-occurrences. Th e first attempt to undertake statistical analysis of collocations in a corpus was by Church and Hanks (1990), but it was not until Kilgarriff , Rychlý, and their colleagues developed the Word Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004) that a user-friendly tool was made wisely available for people to see at a glance how the meanings of a semantically complex word are associated with and indeed activated by its collocates. Modern corpus tools such as these bring us full circle, back to Hornby's original vision of patterns of word use and word meaning. It is now possible to examine that vision in the light of massive bodies of evidence. Not only does this lead inexorably to new theoretical insights into the nature of language, it also make it possible to develop new kinds of dictionaries for human learners and computational applications alike-dictionaries that focus rigorously on patterns of word use, rather than (say) on historical semantics and morphology. In the second part of the lecture, I give a progress report on the corpus-driven Dictionary of English Verb Patterns currently being developed at the Masaryk University in Brno. I compare the Pattern Dictionary with Pattern Grammar and discuss some problems of lexicographical analysis, such as fi nding the right level of generalization for each element in a pattern. How is one sense to be distinguished from another? For a word with many pattern, are some patterns more important than others, and if so why? How are creative uses of a word distinguished from more mundane uses? What is the role, in pattern analysis, of an ontology?

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