Lexical collocations and the teaching of lexical meaning

Abstract

The present study is a corpus-based investigation of syntactic priming, i.e., the tendency to reuse syntactic constructions. On the basis of data from the ICE-GB corpus, I analyze two different pairs of syntactic patterns, the so-called dative alternation & particle placement of transitive phrasal verbs. Although it has sometimes been argued that only experimental data can contribute to studies of priming, the analysis shows that (a) the corpus-based results for datives are very similar to the experimental ones; (b) priming is also obtained for the verb-particle construction, a construction hitherto not explored in the priming literature & (c), most importantly, in line with much previous psycholinguistic & corpus-linguistic work, priming effects turn out to be strongly verb-specific such that some verbs are much more resistant or responsive to priming than others. I conclude with a discussion of how corpus data relate to experimental data & how the corpus-based findings can contribute to psycholinguistic model building. 14 Tables, 3 Figures, 1 Appendix, 50 References. Adapted from the source document