verbs, prepositions, and nouns in each possible combination were analyzed. The paper also details an experiment in which the types of nouns under each of the twenty-two prepositions were coded by human subjects with regard to their semantic features.
Finally, a computer program was also utilized to calculate the shared meaning of the different VERBs and NOUNs, respectively. The results showed that the nouns in [(VERB) PREPOSITION the NOUN of], though might form clusters of meanings, might not behave the same with and without the presence of the verbs.
Keywords: Prepositions, Lexical Bundles, Nouns, Semantic Features, Corpus,
ConstructionsI. INTRODUCTION
According to Biber, Conrad, and Cortes (2004) and Levy (2008), who investigated
‘lexical bundles’ in spoken versus written registers, lexical bundles, or multi-word sequences, are “the most frequent recurring lexical sequences in a register,”including, but not limited to, four-word sequences such as do you want to, take a look at, to come
up with, I don’t know what, one of the things, those of you who, etc. (pg. 376). Their
Most previous studies on lexical bundles focus on register-specific materials. For instance, Biber (2009) compared the most common multi-word patterns in conversation and academic writing and found that the multi-word patterns occurring in the two registers are different. Patterns in conversation tend to be fixed sequences including both function words and content words; patterns in academic writing tend to be formulaic frames consisting of invariable function words with an intervening variable slot that is filled by content words.
Focusing on academic prose, Biber proposed that there are numerous fillers that may occur in the frame the * of the. It was found that four different prepositions tend to precede the * of to form the four-word lexical bundles: at the *of, on the * of, it the * of, and to the * of, all of which some of the patterns of interest in the present paper. Among these, the most distinctive frame is at the * of, which co-occurs frequently with the fillers end, time, beginning, level, expense, start, center/centre, top, and base. On the other hand, in the * of takes several high frequency fillers that are distinctively used in this frame, namely case, absence, form, context, course, and process. Using similar
‘frame’, this paper investigates the distributions of different variables (in capitals) in the pattern [(VERB) PREPOSITION the NOUN of]. The present work focuses not on any specific genre, but in the British National Corpus (BNC), a general corpus. We propose that similar clusters of nouns (and verbs) can also be found in a general corpus. Our study further hypothesizes that the VERBs and NOUNs can be measured in terms of their semantic relatedness. To answer this question, two types of methodologies were employed, one including an experimental-based analysis of semantic features while the second involves an automatic extraction of semantically related hypernyms. The details of this will be illustrated in the next section.
the collocational framework in the medical research paper. The results showed that two of the most common frameworks in the corpus are: [the NOUN of] (e.g. the start of), a NOUN of (e.g. a variety of). [The NOUN of] tends to be used in expressing the construction of nominalizations (e.g. the cloning of); [a NOUN of] is applied frequently to describe the process of quantifying and categorizing. Another important finding is that these two frameworks are likely to precede or follow the collocates belonging to specific semantics classes. For example, the risk of is always preceded by verbs with causative meaning (related/associated with/to the risk of). It was concluded that the selection of specific collocates for these frameworks is conditioned by the linguistic conventions of the genre. In a different study, Cortes (2004), with the attempt to improve the understanding of the function of lexical bundles in academic prose, compared the use of such bundles by published authors in history and biology. The most frequent four-word lexical bundles in these genres were classified in terms of their structure groups. The finding revealed that lexical bundles in history mainly belong to two structural groups: noun phrases and prepositional phrases while lexical bundles in biology cover a wider range of structural groups, including noun phrases, prepositional phrases, [it + Vbe + adjective], [Vbe + complement], and [noun phrase + V + complement] clause fragments. In general, both in history and biology genres, the majority of the bundles could be categorized into the groups containing noun phrase with of phrase fragment (e.g., a measure of the, the beginning of the) and prepositional phrases with embedded of phrase (e.g., as a function of, at the beginning of, at the
university of). From here, one can see that most of these studies in lexical bundles
needed to deal with noun phrases and prepositional phrases in one way or another. For instance, Biber et al. (1999) found that, in academic prose, 60% of the bundles areon the basis of, and on the other hand. Noun phrases and prepositional phrase fragments
were also found as the most frequent patterns in academic prose (also found in Cortes, 2004; and Hyland 2008ab). Similarly, scientific discourse is also characterized by very frequent occurrences of nouns, long words, prepositions, conjuncts, agentless, and by-passives, past participial adverbial clauses (Biber, 1988). In a book by Silverter López (2009), he investigated the particle meanings of in and on. In his methodology,“multi-word lexicalised expression” was recognized as one of the criteria in extracting verb-particle constructions (VPC). Multi-word expressions were included in his VPC analysis because some uses of in and on such that in “to Decide in favour of sb” are
“motivated by” the noun (favour in this example) “rather than being directly bounded to the verbal element” (pg. 159). Given the above studies, we postulate that it might be useful to investigate lexical bundles by examining the nouns (and the verbs) in a given construction. This paper inspects the both the nouns and the verbs in the constructions [(VERB) PREPOSITION the NOUN of], co-occurring with twenty-two different prepositions.1
Looking not at one particular preposition, this paper investigates a group of prepositions in terms of distributional patterns. As Silverter López has discovered, some of the particles were closely related to the nearby nouns than to the verbs, in this study, we inspects this kind of phraseological phenomenon. The foci of this study are: (a) To compare the distributions of NOUNs and VERBs in the construction [(VERB) PREPOSITION the NOUN of] when twenty-two different prepositions are involved;
and (b) To display similarities of meanings among NOUNs and VERBs, respectively, in this construction. The ultimate goal is to propose a systematic way to analyzing semantic features of nouns and verbs given a preposition-containing construction. Two
features, and computational calculation of semantic meanings by measuring the common hypernym, if any, found between any two nouns or verbs, respectively. Both these methodologies complement each other and the results were cross-referred.
II. DATA FROM THE CORPUS
All data discussed in this paper were taken from the written portion of BNC, retrieved through BNCWeb, a platform which allows access to the BNC through search engine of its own (Hoffmann et al., 2008). Twenty-two prepositions (about, above, across, after,
against, among, around, as, at, beside, by, down, for, from, in, into, like, of, off, on, onto,
and with) were investigated. It was hypothesized that the groups of words that appear with a similar preposition would share some similarities in semantic features. In the following sections, the distributional patterns will first be discussed, followed by a semantic analysis by human subjects. Finally, in section III, a computational program will be discussed.II.1 Distributional Patterns
In the written portion of the BNC, 373,258 instances of [PREPOSITION the NOUN of]
and 86,877 instances of [VERB PREPOSITION the NOUN of] were found. These instances were analyzed according to the different types of verbs and nouns, respectively.
The following Table 1 displays the most frequent patterns for each preposition, along with their frequencies and percentages. For example, about the nature of has a frequency of 225 and the percentage of nature in the construction of [about the NOUN
of] is 4.5%. Patterns with the same scores were all listed (as for among and onto).
Table 1. Frequencies of [(VERB) PREPOSITION the NOUN of] in BNC
about about the nature of
(225, 4.5%)set about the task of
(11, 0.52%)above above the level of
(57, 10.14%)
shouted above the noise of
(3, 2.01%)across across the top of
(49, 5.85%)runs across the front of
(3, 1.01%)after after the death of
(270, 7.2%)
look after the interests of
(7, 1.29%)against against the background of
(176, 6.22%)seen against the background of
(10, 1.02%)among among the members of
(36, 5.15%)discovered among the remains of was among the members of
were among the beneficiaries of distribute among the members of
was among the founders of are among the findings of
be among the victims of
(2, 1.36%, respectively)around around the time of
(90, 6.86%)
was around the time of
(5, 0.99%)lived beside the Loch of
(2, 10%)by by the end of
(688, 13.76%)
completed by the end of
(56, 0.45%)down down the side of
(89, 7.09%)