2007 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
A Descriptive and Theoretical Study of Constructions in English and their Coroocurrences A Corpus-Based Approach
| Project/Area Number |
17320073
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
English linguistics
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| Research Institution | Nagoya University |
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Principal Investigator |
TAKIZAWA Naohiro Nagoya University, Graduate School of International Development, Professor (60252285)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
OMURA Takeshi Nagoya University, Graduate School of International Development, Professor (70185388)
OHNA Tsutomu Nagoya University, Graduate School of International Development, Associate Professor (00233205)
FUKAYA Teruhiko Sugiyama Jogakuen University, School of Cross-Cultural Studies, Professor (30173313)
TSUZUKI Masako Chukyo University, School of International liberal Studies, Professor (00227448)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2005 – 2007
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| Keywords | corpus / constructions / basic form and its variants / co-occurrence of constructions / MI-score / t-score / Englihsh Teachine |
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| Research Abstract |
In this project, several constructions in the English language were minutely analyzed using huge-sized corpora (the Bank of English corpus and the British National Corpus, among others). The constructions studied include : the resultative construction, the wh-constructions, the 'haven't NP' pattern in American English, the SOV construction, 'The problem is that S' construction, the parenthetical clauses, the 'one's way' construction, the 'A Beautiful Two Weeks' construction, the cognate object construction. The previous literature concerning these constructions (in the frameworks of Traditional/Descriptive Grammar to Generative Grammar to Construction Grammar) were critically surveyed, and some inadequacies and theoretical problems were thus revealed. Based on these surveys and with the help, of corpora, we have disclosed not only syntactic and semantic properties of each construction but also its lexical and functional characteristics, and investigated what particular roles the lexica
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l items play in each construction.
In the process, we paid due attention not only the basic types but also to their variants, and in so doing, we examined the "extension process" of constructions.
We also explored the possibility to use some statistical measures(specifically, the t-score and MI-score)for construction studies. These measures have been used in the collocation studies but they have turned out to be useful for revealing the relationship between the construction and the lets as well.
We have developed some techniques and methods for effectively extracting relevant examples from corpora, including those based on regular expression pattern matching.Tsutomu Ohna wrote a detailed reference book for using regular expressions, and it is included in the final report.
As for the presentations, Naohiro Takizawa talked about his research on the SOV construction at the ICAME conference held in Helsinki(2006) . Teruhiko Fukaya made a presentation at the international conference "Exploring the Lexis Grammar Interface" in Hanover (2007). Less
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