Collocation Colligationn_part II

COLLOCATION, COLLIGATION ANDENCODING DICTIONARIES. PART II:LEXICOGRAPHICAL ASPECTS

Dirk Siepmann:Universita t-GHSiegen, Fachbereich 3, Adolf-Reichwein-Strae,D-57068 Siegen,Germany ([email protected])

Abstract

The present article starts from a broad definition of collocations as holistic

lexico-grammatical or semantic units (see Part I for full details), asking how such

units can be adequately represented in bilingual and monolingual encoding dictionaries.

It is found that an onomasiological approach to dictionary making is better suited to

this task than a semasiological, framework-based methodology whereby individual

lexicographers work on small, alphabetically classified sections of the dictionary.

Typically, semasiological dictionaries and corresponding methodologies have difficulty

in arranging items in a clear and memorable way, give patchy or inadequate coverage to

semantic-pragmatic collocations, cannot provide adequate cross-referencing between

synonymous items and are prone to translation errors. It is shown how onomasiological

dictionaries and methodologies can remedy such deficiencies. The Bilexicon project

aimed at creating thematic learners dictionaries is the main source laid under

contribution with a view to illustrating the suggestions made.

1. Introduction

There is growing recognition that both structurally simple (i.e. (bound)

morphemes, lexemes) and structurally complex units (i.e. collocations or

colligational patterns) are linguistic signs (Feilke 2003). If the dictionary is

meant to be a record of such signs, the task of the lexicographer is to gather

together evidence of both types of sign. So far it has been lexemes, non-

compositional idioms and morphemes that have received the bulk of

lexicographic attention, but the future clearly belongs to collocation and

colligation in the widest possible sense. However, most linguistic models of

collocation are too limited (e.g. Hausmann 1999), too formalist (e.g. Melcuk

1998) or too broad (e.g. Kjellmer 1994) to be readily adaptable to lexicographic

practice (see the first part of this article, IJL 18/4).

International Journal of Lexicography, Vol. 19 No. 1. Advance access publication 29 November 2005 2005 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions,please email: [email protected]

doi:10.1093/ijl/eci051 1

A viable lexicographic definition of collocation can be based on the notions

of Gebrauchsnorm, or usage norm (Steyer 2000: 108), reflected in concepts

such as minimal recurrence (Kocourek 1991, Siepmann 2003) or statistical

significance (Sinclair 1991), on the one hand, and the notion of inhaltliche

Geschlossenheit or holisticity, on the other hand (Siepmann 2003). Holisticity

here refers to the facts that native speakers can ascribe meaning to general-

language collocations even if these are divorced from context and that such

units are intuitively considered as self-contained wholes. We thus arrive at the

following definition of collocation:

a collocation is any holistic lexical, lexico-grammatical or semantic

unit which exhibits minimal recurrence within a particular discourse

community.

It should also be taken to include colligation with a particular grammatical

category, such as a noun phrase. Thus, the collocations the future belongs to

(die Zukunft gehort, lavenir appartient a`) or lautoroute file would be felt to

be incomplete by most speakers, requiring as they do a prepositional object.

This variable complement is conceived of as part of the collocation.

With this definition in mind, it becomes possible to suggest a four-way

typology of collocation along the following lines (see Part I):

(a) Colligation ( you can stick yourNP, far be it from me to INF, ignorertout deN, il ny a qua` INF, ce/cette N [tradition, etc.] est reste(e),NP dans lame, typischN, etc.); note that this definition of colligation isdifferent from Firths (1957) or Hoeys (1998)1, since it concerns not only

the grammatical preferences of individual words, but also those of longer

syntagms. Thus, the syntagm tu navais qua` can be said to be in colligation

with an infinitive clause.

(b) Collocation between lexemes or phrasemes ( just as clause . . . so / in thesame manner clause, levy charges, briser ses chaussures, cest-a`-dire enloccurrence, regarde ou` tu vas, bon ben, a` la fin, etc.).

(c) Collocation between lexemes and semantic-pragmatic (contextual)

features (beautifully [result of creative activity], [uncertainty] not so,[question] eh bien, [expectation] duly, [negative contextual aspect](not) detract from s.o.s enjoyment, help! [on such one-word collocations,

cf. Gonzalez-Rey 2002: 95, 101)

(d) Collocation between semantic-pragmatic features (e.g. long-distance

collocations, Siepmann 2005).

This typology and the notational conventions that go with it present two

major advantages with a view to lexicographic applications: they allow us to

capture the full range of collocational phenomena, and they dispense almost

2 Dirk Siepmann

entirely with complicated metalanguage such as that used in Melcuks

lexicologie combinatoire et explicative (Melcuk et al. 1995).

In what follows, I shall discuss some of the demands the full-scale integration

of lexico-grammatical units of the type just discussed places upon commercial

monolingual and bilingual encoding dictionaries. My main concern therefore

is with the reference needs of active users, such as the native French speaker

trying to write, speak or translate into English. My thesis is that the bilingual

onomasiological rather than the semasiological dictionary constitutes the ideal

repository for the collocational and colligational units required by active

users. After a brief description of the Bilexicon project aimed at producing

near-comprehensive thematic learners dictionaries, I shall go on to marshal

various sorts of evidence on the weaknesses of the semasiological and the

strengths of the onomasiological approach. This will lead to the conclusion

that the traditional dictionary-making process should be turned on its head:

rather than starting from an alphabetical framework it should proceed from

a bilingual or multilingual onomasiological research base.

I shall then proceed to discuss coverage of collocations in current bilingual

and monolingual dictionaries, together with suggestions for improvement.

The last two sections will be devoted to types of lemmas and limits on the

translatability of collocations.

2. A brief outline of the Bilexicon project

The Bilexicon project pursues a theoretical as well as a practical aim. On the

theoretical side, the aim is to provide a sound basis for the production of

unabridged onomasiological bilingual learners dictionaries which focus on

collocation. On the practical side, such dictionaries are to be developed for the

language pairs English/French, English/German and French/German, both in

print and electronic form.

The project can be sketched in rough outline only. What is said here should

not be taken to suggest that the problem of describing the native-speaker

lexicon or specific sections thereof is easily solved (for a fuller account,

see Siepmann, in preparation; for a sample chapter, see the authors website

www.dirk-siepmann.de).

2.1 Rationale

The rationale behind the Bilexicon project proceeds from a paradox about

foreign language learning in higher education: language teaching specialists

have long demanded that university graduates in modern languages should

have a native-like lexical competence in their L2 (e.g. Meiner et al. 2001);

in practice, however, such a competence is seldom attained, and few serious

Collocation, Colligation and Encoding Dictionaries 3

efforts have been made to improve attainment levels. De Florio-Hansen

(2004: 83f ) sums up the situation at German universities by stating that

students linguistic competence does not increase significantly between the

beginning of their course of study and its successful completion.

However, to sustain a prolonged learning effort, students must be told how

many and which lexical items they have to learn before they can confidently

claim to be competent users of the foreign languages of their choice (cf. Council

of Europe 2001: 6.4.7.2). Only once this material basis for vocabulary learning

has been laid do methodological factors come into play and can realistic

assimilation targets be set.

2.2 The compilation ofa native-like vocabulary

So far little research effort has been expended upon describing the extent

of native-like lexical competence in the L2. There is only one study for the

language pair German-French (Hausmann, forthcoming), whose aim it is to list

a large section of the receptive vocabulary of French which is intransparent

from a German perspective.

What Hausmann has achieved for the receptive side the Bilexicon project

aims to do for the productive side: to draw up a near-comprehensive list of

those collocations (including colligations) which may be considered to make

up a native-like vocabulary. The compilation of the native-like vocabulary

proceeds from two premises:

(a) Any attempt to determine basic and advanced vocabularies must start

from a list of all native-speaker signs (perhaps even including manual and

facial gestures), i.e. the entire lexicon of the language. The approach is thus

essentially top-down.

(b) It is from such a list that a near-native vocabulary can then be constructed.

Thus, rather than asking, as the traditional frequency approach did, which

are the most frequent words in the language, and which words do we need

to add to these to obtain a good working vocabulary?, this approach poses

the question what are the meaning units that native speakers use, and which

of these have to be mastered to be able to perform at a near-native (or lower)

proficiency level?. It is based on the simple observation that some adult

learners can pass as native speakers of the L2 because they have perfect

pronunciation and a command of lexico-grammar which is sufficient to express

any communicative need in a correct and natural manner. Nevertheless these

learners have not normally attained the same level of lexical competence as

a native; even for them, the framing of ideas in the foreign language is

conditioned by linguistic proficiency. It is the level of vocabulary knowledge

achieved by such learners that can be described as near-native.

4 Dirk Siepmann

In theory, therefore, it should be fairly easy to establish a procedure that

might be used in compiling a near-native vocabulary. In practice, however,

such a procedure still comes up against considerable, if not insuperable

difficulties. The procedure might look something like this. In a first step a

full-size lexico-grammar of at least one language would have to be compiled.

The main problem at this stage is to give a definition of multi-word units that is

sophisticated enough to distinguish these from lexical bundles (Biber et al.

1999) or n-grams, i.e. mere strings of word forms which occur more than once

in a corpus. Such a definition has been attempted in Part I of this article. Thus,

for example, at the end of the is an n-gram retrievable from any medium-sized

corpus, but underlying it is the colligation at the end of the NP.

The frequency approach is an adaptation, to linguistic units beyond the

word level, of the traditional procedure for determining core vocabularies.

At its simplest, it uses a very large corpus to determine the frequency of

each meaning unit; units whose frequency is below a minimum threshold are

discarded. It is not difficult to see why this approach, if used exclusively,

is more or less unworkable. The main reason is that there is no such thing as

a representative corpus, and there are no very large corpora available which

can provide accurate guidance on spoken usage. Even the Internet or sections

of it, such as google.co.uk with the option pages from the UK is neither

representative nor reliable as a corpus. Apart from being skewed towards the

written language, it contains large amounts of outdated and non-native speaker

material2; it is also uninformative on range and distribution, i.e. the extent to

which an item appears in several different text types.

In an alternative approach, each collocational or colligational unit could

be subjected to a test for economy effects. As explained above, foreign-born

speakers who pass as natives have not normally developed the same lexical

competence as native speakers; they succeed in giving a native-like impression

by recycling or creatively recombining items from what is admittedly

a vast repertoire. This repertoire, however, need not contain the hundreds of

thousands of rough formulaic synonyms that native speakers have at their

disposal. In other words, the native-like speaker can achieve considerable

economies in learning effort by acquiring just one expression for each com-

municative need. Siepmann (in preparation) suggests that such economies

manifest themselves in at least eight different economy effects resulting in the

elimination of a collocation or lexeme from the near-native vocabulary.

To take but one example, a native English speaker wishing to describe the

state of being stationary in traffic can choose from among a number of

synonymic expressions, such as be / get caught in a traffic jam, be / get caught

up in a traffic jam, be / get stuck in a traffic jam, sit in traffic, sit in a traffic jam,

be stationary, etc. For the non-native, knowledge of just one of these expres-

sions will do; when it comes to choosing which, the criteria of frequency,

availability and learnability may be invoked.


It should have become clear that, despite its deficiencies, the second

alternative is more promising than an approach based on frequency alone,

especially if the point of departure is a clearly delimited area of the vocabulary,

such as the language of motoring or the vocabulary relating to feelings. First,

a very large corpus of subject-specific material is assembled from Internet and

other sources, such as corpora and published dictionaries. In constructing

such a corpus, it is important to include Internet genres that are lexically close

to real-life speech, such as news forums, e-mail, fan fiction, film and soap

opera scenarios. A further means of reducing the inevitable bias towards

writing in corpus construction is to elicit judgements from native speakers on

the currency of particular words and collocations in speech. It is to be expected,

however, that such tests will produce tangible results in only a few vocabulary

areas, such as proverbs (Arnaud 1992) or idioms. In others, such as motoring,

the sheer size of the lexical material precludes any detailed investigation of

native-speaker judgements.

The third alternative is some sort of combination of the frequency-based

approach and the approach drawing on economy effects, which could,

for example, be applied in succession. Economy effects may also be taken

into consideration in determining proficiency levels below the near-native level.

The subsequent procedure involves three major steps:

(1) Corpora and dictionary sources are tapped to identify all the individual

word-forms and words belonging to the vocabulary area in question. This

involves the making of a corpus-based word list using for example

the WordSmith tool of the same name and the use of dictionaries which

allow full-text searches or searches by subject area, such as TLF, DO, PR

or CIDE.

(2) In the next step, programs such as WordSmith and Collocate are used

to determine the collocations and patterns entered by the items on the

word list.

(3) The third step is to eliminate redundant collocations on the basis of the

aforementioned economy effects.

In a fourth, optional step various proficiency levels might be distinguished

on the basis of the frequency of collocations and single words or on the

basis of the transparency of items for particular user groups (cf. Hausmann,

forthcoming).

2.3 Macrostructure

The project stands in the long tradition of what, borrowing from McArthur

(1986), we might call thematic learner lexicography a tradition that goes

6 Dirk Siepmann

back almost to the dawn of civilisation. Recent examples of this tradition

include LLCE, VAEA and CW, to name but a few.

As McArthur (1998: 153) believes, it is impossible to find an ultimate true

schema for ordering things and words in the world, and the Bilexicon Project

lays no major claim to innovation in this respect. Its point of departure is

a fairly traditional division of the lexicon into topic areas such as motoring

and sub-areas such as parking. Where it does innovate is in the distinction

between topic areas and situation types and in cross-referencing between

syntactically and semantically similar patterns, which will be available only

in the electronic version.

The distinction between topic areas and situation types is not perfectly

clear-cut and merits a brief explanation. In a sense, every communicative

situation is of course unique, but it seems permissible to generalise across

specific situations to arrive at similar situation-types (Lyne 1985) or text-

types embedded in more general topic areas (McArthur 1981). An exclusive

focus on either of these, as found in the works just cited, seems severely

limiting, as topic areas and situation-types are interdependent. One situation-

type, such as a court hearing, can involve widely varying topics. It may also

be subdivided into any number of sub-types, down to as narrow a discoursal

span as the conversational turn in the case of a simple exchange of greetings

(speaker A: hello, speaker B: hello); conversely, the same topic, such as an

account of an accident, can occur in several different situation-types or text-

types, such as general conversation, court hearings, newspaper reports or

insurance claims letters. Let us consider a few examples to illustrate the

possible categorisation of various types of collocation (see Table 1).

What distinguishes the Bilexicon from other bilingual thesauri is that

allocation of entries to topic areas is essentially bottom-up, that is, it is

the collocations found in the subject-specific corpora which determine the

Table 1: Semantic categorization in a conceptually organised dictionary

Collocation Topic Area 1:

Situation Type 1

Topic Area 2:

Situation Type 2

money/funds/a sum/etc.leave account/bank/etc.

Banking

Tu craches ta valda ? Road traffic: Traffic

lights (obsolescent)

Emotions: Impatience

regarde ou` tu vas! Movement: Moving

with care

Emotions: Care

(or Caution)

make s.o. feel small Emotions: Humiliation

I would give anything

to INFEmotions: Cravings


setting up and internal structuring of sub-areas and situation types. This stands

in contrast with traditional approaches to thesaurus building, where terms were

inserted into a fully pre-determined ontological structure. There are, of course,

obvious limitations to such an approach in that some words and collocations

have both general and topic-specific uses. A case in point is the vocabulary

relating to damage, which is important in such situation types as car accidents

but may also apply to a wide range of other situations (any kind of accident,

intention to harm, legal terminology, etc.).

Underlying this thematic organization in the electronic version will be a layer

of semantic links inspired by such work as Francis, Hunston and Manning

(1996, 1998), who have shown that words entering similar patterns usually

share an aspect of meaning. This will enable users to extend their vocabulary

along a non-thematic route and will raise their awareness of the close link

between sense and syntax.

3. Semasiological vs. onomasiological dictionaries

As noted in the previous section, the Bilexicon project aims at producing

bilingual onomasiological dictionaries whose main entry type will be of a

collocational nature. This represents a break with the word-based lexicography

still current in both semasiological and onomasiological approaches. Semasio-

logical dictionaries tend to consist of an alphabetical word list leading the user

from the word to its meaning, while onomasiological dictionaries allow the

user to proceed from a particular concept and find the most appropriate

word for it. Both types of dictionary are therefore mainly based on individual

words although, perforce, including phraseology in sub-entries and examples.

This section begins with a brief critique of the notion of word meaning before

discussing the effectiveness of the two types of dictionary in representing

collocation.

3.1 Meaningunits beyond the word

The vast majority of todays dictionaries are based on the Saussaurean

paradigm that the basic unit of meaning in a language is the word; accordingly,

dictionaries are regarded as word books (cf. German Worterbucher) which

provide records of the various senses of individual words. So influential

has been this view of the dictionary that the bestsellers among present-day

monolingual and bilingual encoding dictionaries are small to medium-sized,

alphabetically organised pocket or desk dictionaries which list one-to-one

equivalents between words and provide only limited guidance on the syntag-

matics of language. Modern dictionaries thus perpetuate the time-honoured

8 Dirk Siepmann

tradition of recording single words which has existed at least since Babylonian

antiquity.

There is, of course, no denying the fact that speakers can isolate words

from context and thus arrive at a definition of word meanings. However, since

the definition of word meaning requires the speaker to engage in a process of

abstraction, it is at least debatable whether it is word meanings that underlie

the speakers competence. Even the elicitability of paradigmatic relations

between the meanings of individual words does not allow us to conclude

that word meanings are stored in paradigmatic networks in what is often

called the mental lexicon (cf. Aitchison 1994). It is equally conceivable that

observees in psychological experiments respond with particular paradigmatic

associations because they have repeatedly met the associated items in

syntagmatic strings (cf. Rapp and Wettler 1992, Rapp 1995); as Jones (2002)

has shown, antonyms, for example, tend to co-occur syntagmatically (good or

bad, rich and poor).

The crucial factor in the acquisition of meanings thus seems to be the

primary association between lexical units of varying length3 and their extra-

linguistic and/or intralingual context of occurrence rather than the secondary

paradigmatic connections between two or more words that speakers can

establish when prompted or the word meaning which they can abstract out of

context when asked. Put another way, when unprompted, speakers produce

meanings by syntagmatically associating and/or modifying lexical chunks

which they have encountered before in similar contexts as the current one.

Our own practices of dictionary making have blinded us to the fact that we do

not communicate by stringing together individual words, but rather by means

of semi-prefabricated lexico-grammatical units.

This view, first proposed in outline by Bally (1909), has recently come to the

fore again in the Firthian tradition. Meaning is seen as residing in typical

combinations of lexical choices or collocability on the one hand, and typical

combinations of grammatical choices or colligation on the other (Hunston

2001). A crucial aspect of an items meaning is its semantic prosody, a term

which reflects the realisation that lexical items become infused with particular

connotations due to their typical linguistic environment (Sinclair 1991, Louw

1993, Stubbs 1995).

The implications of the above for lexicography, especially learner lexicog-

raphy are clear: if a) meaning is considered to be inherent in collocation (under

which term I here subsume colligation) and b) the dictionary is intended to

provide a record of the units of meaning in a language, then future dictionaries

will have to provide a full account of collocational meaning units and their

typical contexts of occurrence.4 One of the most obvious desiderata, then, is for

collocations, as defined in the introduction, to be given entry status. Rather

than appear in the exemplificatory material, collocations of this type should

themselves be illustrated with examples as necessary.


3.2 Difficulties ofthe semasiologicaldictionaryinrecordingandrepresentingcollocation

The foregoing considerations raise questions about the macrostructure, micro-

structure and mediostructure (Hartmann 2001: 6466) of a dictionary which

could adequately represent collocation. There are a variety of systematic

reasons why traditional semasiological print dictionaries, whether mono-

lingual or bilingual, will tend to fall short of this goal. Tersely stated, the main

reasons are:

(1) the difficulty of arranging items in a clear and memorable way;

(2) the inadequate coverage and representation of collocation between lexemes

and semantic-pragmatic features;

(3) insufficient discrimination between collocations and examples.

Let us deal with these in sequence.

3.2.1 Place of entry. Firstly, semasiological dictionaries arrange entries by thealphabet. If collocations are to be given entry or sub-entry status in such

dictionaries, this will pose the age-old question about the word or word-form

under which the multi-word entry should appear. There is a wide range of

possibilities for resolving this question. The policy of many dictionaries is to

indicate some of the collocates of headwords in square brackets or in the

exemplificatory material and to enter (comparatively) fixed expressions such as

idioms at the first notional word. Thus, the idioms all hell breaks loose and

out of a clear blue sky would be found respectively at hell and clear. There are

a number of possible alternatives to this organizing schema (cf. Gates 1988).

For example:

(1) Collocations may be arranged alphabetically by their first components.

(2) Collocations may be entered at the semantically most important

component.

(3) Collocations may be entered at the grammatically most important

component.

(4) Collocations may be entered at the least frequent component if there is a

wide difference in frequency between the constituents (cf. Bogaards 1990).

The second of these possibilities would partially solve the difficulties users

have in locating collocations because of their directionality; two-item

collocations are still normally recorded at the entry for the collocate rather

than for the base (i.e. the semantically most important word). Thus, users will

find meet a criterion under meet rather than criterion, although their

formulation process starts with the noun. One wonders, however, whether

the second and third of these schemas will always lead to an unequivocal

solution, as lexicographers and users views on what is semantically and

grammatically most important may differ. The fourth solution reflects user

10 Dirk Siepmann

preferences identified in an empirical study, but seems only to apply to native

(French) dictionary users rather than language learners (Bogaards 1990).

For the sake of user convenience, it is desirable therefore to enter a col-

location under each of its meaning components and to cross-refer the user to

the place where the entry is found. Drawing on this insight, Petermann (1983)

has devised a consistent location policy for traditionally conceived phrasemes

(i.e. fixed expressions) which could also be applied to collocations. He suggests

that each phraseme should appear under each of its notional components

while being assigned only to one main entry. The choice of this entry is to be

determined by the following criteria: if the phraseme contains a noun, this

becomes the main entry; if there are several nouns, main entry is given to the

first. If there is no noun, main entry is given to the first adjective, etc., in the

following order: verb, adverb, pronoun, numeral, interjection. Consistent as

this policy may be in theory, the question is whether the average dictionary user

can be expected to comprehend it. Interestingly, however, it is in keeping with

the results of an empirical study (Bogaards 1990), which found that Dutch

language learners begin their searches with nouns, followed by adjectives

and verbs.

Another common suggestion consists in recording different types of

phrasemes in different ways (Burger 1989: 595). Fully idiomatic phrasemes

are to be listed under one of their components only, with cross-references at

the entries for other components; the choice of the entry term should not be

governed by semantic considerations, as these require the largest amount of

previous knowledge on the part of the user. Partially idiomatic phrasemes

which are linked to a specific meaning of a headword are to be treated under

the relevant sense division. Non-idiomatic phrasemes have to be discussed

at each of their components, under the relevant senses. Although presenting

the clear advantage of highlighting connections of meaning, this arrangement

is theoretically unsound in that, rather than recognizing the holisticity of

collocations, it presupposes their semantic divisibility and may entail an

etymological re-motivation of what is only a partially motivated or

unmotivated fixed expression (see also Burger 1989: 595).

To compound matters, the nesting of collocations may make retrieval

difficult. A large number of syntactically well-formed collocations (cf. for

example regarde ou` tu vas or Ive got [liquid, crumbs, etc.] all over/on [piece of

clothing, exercise book, etc.]) are made up of highly frequent individual lexemes

such as regarder, aller, have, haben, etc., a factor which contributes to heavily

inflating entries for such words. Current unabridged dictionaries bear ample

testimony to this, although they are still a long way from including the

totality of collocations. Thus, the entry for aller in PR, for example, runs to

three and a half columns.

One way of solving this problem would be to draw items together in blocks

at the end of the entry. Each block would present items exhibiting a particular


type of syntactic relationship, after the manner of OC, for example. But then

again such clustering may be difficult to justify with clearly motivated multi-

word units like there is good reason to INF; there is a strong case here fortreatment under the relevant sense division of reason.

There are, of course, equally good reasons for giving main entry to

collocations as there are for recording them under a sub-entry, whether this be

a separate entry or a sense division of a particular headword (cf. Burger 1998:

172 on multi-word units). However, if we decide to give collocations main

entry status, this will entail an even more complex macrostructure. To take but

one example, multi-word collocations serving a pragmatic or text-structuring

function and beginning with the pronoun it (it behoves us to INF, it is worthbearing in mind that/wh-clause, etc.) or the preposition to (to give an example,to this end, to return toNP) would fill dozens of pages, and so would two-itemcollocations beginning either with common nodes or common collocates

(such as increase or give).

From all this it seems reasonable to conclude, as most theorists do (cf. for

example Burger 1989: 595 on phrasemes), that there is no ready-made solution

for the positioning of collocational units in semasiological dictionaries.

Each case requires to be considered on its own merits, and the preferences of

particular user groups have to be taken into account (Bogaards 1990, 1991);

there should be neither consistent conflation into end-of-article nests nor

arbitrary allocation to a particular sense division. Rather, as with derivatives

and compounds (which have traditionally been conceived of as distinct from

collocations), it is inevitable to steer a middle course between considerations

of semantic relatedness, user convenience and economy of treatment (cf. Cowie

1999: 150 on derivatives and compounds). In any case, collocations should

be highlighted typographically, and, if necessary, attention should be drawn

to their special pragmatic and/or text-structuring functions. However, given

the sheer size of the class of collocations, alphabetical access seems an

unmanageable solution in the long run.

3.2.2 Representation of semantic-pragmatic collocations. If we now ascertain therelationship between types of collocations and the problems associated with

recording them, it turns out that the semasiological dictionary experiences

the greatest difficulty in adequately representing purely semantic-pragmatic

collocations occurring in specific situation-types or topic areas. A pertinent

example is afforded by semantic-pragmatic collocations based around mordre

sur (overlap into, go over into, cut into, veer off course into/onto), which

occur in three main topic areas, viz. a) geography (e.g. une region mord sur une

autre), b) medicine (une partie du corps mord sur une autre) and c) motoring

(une voiture mord sur une partie de la route).

The bilingual semasiological encoding dictionary has two options to

represent such information: by adapting PGF style: une voiture mord sur qc

12 Dirk Siepmann

(accotement, ligne mediane, etc.), or by adapting CR style: [voiture] mordre sur

[accotement]. Of these, the first would seem to be immediately comprehensible

to the user, since it is very close to a natural language sentence. The mono-

lingual encoding dictionary could solve the problem by using Cobuilds folk

definition style, which allows the lexicographer to place typical collocates in

the first part of the defining sentence:

lorsquune voiture mord sur une partie de la chaussee ou sur le bas-cote,

elle va au-dela` de la voie de circulation qui lui est normalement attribuee

Unfortunately, apart from Cobuild, DAFA and, to a lesser extent, CIDE, none

of the available monolingual dictionaries have so far made any use of the above

procedures for representing collocational meaning.

One deficiency of the semasiological encoding dictionary which even Cobuild

has been unable to remedy is the impossibility of representing synonymy

between collocations in a space-saving and user-friendly manner. Let us

consider the following example of a collocation of type 3 and its possible

representation in a semasiological dictionary:

money=funds=a sum leave account=bank=fund=countryIf we were to record this semantic-pragmatic collocation ([money]

leave [place where money is stored]) with a view to enabling the user tocomprehend and encode it in its entirety, we would have to make a minimum of

three entries (at money, funds and sum) and a maximum of eight entries (money,

funds, sum, account, bank, fund, country, leave), not to speak of the amount of

cross-referencing that would be required. Moreover, collocational attraction

between any two of the constituents in this semantic-pragmatic collocation

(e.g. funds leave country) may be too weak to show up in a concordancebased on mutual information (Church and Hanks 1990) or log likelihood

(Dunning 1993), thereby not warranting the inclusion of any specific

collocation. Yet the semantic-pragmatic collocation as a whole is clearly

frequent enough and of interest to language learners, especially since other

languages such as German may have slightly different ways of expressing

the same idea (e.g. money leaves an account Geld geht von einem Konto ab /

[less commonly:] Geld verlat ein Konto).

3.2.3 Examples vs. collocations. Another problem with existing semasiologicaldictionaries is that they fail to distinguish between examples and collocations,

i.e. they frequently record holistic units within the exemplificatory material

rather than assigning them entry status and exemplifying them in their turn.

This is not usually a serious problem with traditional two-word collocations

in which the collocate assumes a specific meaning if we disregard for

the moment the fact that such collocations may still be difficult to locate


for users but it becomes one in the case of collocations which appear to have

been freely put together by the application of general semantic and syntactic

rules. This can be illustrated with two examples, one from an unabridged

monolingual dictionary (GR) and one from a monolingual learners dictionary

(CCED).

GR, which offers a sprinkling of extended collocations, will serve to

illustrate the haphazard nature of current practice (for further detail, see

Siepmann 2005). Thus, the exemplificatory infinitive clause pour nen citer

quun exemple a collocation of type 2 common in academic writing is found

as the second example under sub-entry II.2:

(XIVe). Cas, evenement particulier, chose precise qui entre dans

(une categorie, un genre . . .) et qui sert a` confirmer, illustrer, preciser

(un concept). Voici un exemple de sa betise. Pour ne (nen) citer quun

(seul) exemple. Apercu, echantillon, specimen. Ce cas offre un exemple

typique de telle maladie. 5X Type. Cest un bel exemple de presence

desprit! Alleguer, apporter des exemples a` lappui dune assertion, dune

affirmation. 5X Preuve. Exemple concret illustrant une idee abstraite.

Appuyer (cit. 5) dun exemple. Exemples donnes dans un manuel de physique,

de chimie. Exemple bien, mal choisi. Donnez-moi un exemple de volcan

eteint, de plissement tertiaire. Exemples a` lappui dun raisonnement,

dune demonstration. Exemple qui prouve que . . . Il ma cite lexemple de

ce chanteur (! 1. Basse, cit. 7). Puiser ses exemples dans lhistoire(! Egosme, cit. 1). (GR, s.v. exemple)

The multi-word collocation in question has been entered as an example

sentence followed by a full stop. This implies that the phrase can stand on its

own, thus obscuring its textual function of introducing an example, and

potentially leading at least the foreign-born user astray.

With a collocation such as we (now) turn (now) to the situation is even less

clear. In CCED it appears in the exemplificatory material at sub-entry 12 for

turn and is not explicitly marked as a collocational unit:

We turn now to the British news.

This example sentence may, however, not be very useful to learners, since it

neglects to highlight that we are dealing with a transitional device that can be

employed in both spoken and written English rather than an ad-hoc formation.

The drawbacks of such practice should by now be obvious. For one thing,

neither the native nor the non-native user will be sensitised to the holistic

nature of multi-word units. For another, the non-native user in particular

will find it difficult to find variants of a particular collocation, such as pour ne

donner quun exemple or pour prendre un seul exemple in the case of the example

from GR this is due to the lack of synonymic links in the mediostructure

14 Dirk Siepmann

already touched upon. One reason for the lack of cross-referencing with

regard to synonyms is what may be termed the alphabetical framework

approach to dictionary making. In the compilation of large-scale dictionaries

one commonly starts by drawing up an alphabetical list, or framework

of the major sense divisions before assigning one small section of the

alphabetical list to the individual lexicographer, who will identify and enter

collocations of individual lexemes without much regard to the findings of his

or her colleagues.

As can also be inferred from the above examples, another serious

disadvantage of current practice is that common collocations tend to be

submerged amid a welter of detail. Thus, in GR, it takes a considerable amount

of searching to locate the concessive discourse marker il faut bien reconnatre

que within one of the sub-entries for reconnatre. The specific pragmatic

function of the marker is not made explicit; rather, it must be inferred from

the general definition given under sense division 4 of reconnatre or from its

synonymy with the evidence marker il faut se rendre a` levidence, to which the

reader is cross-referred.

4. (XIVe). Admettre pour vrai apre`s avoir nie, ou apre`s avoir doute,

accepter malgre des reticences. 5X Admettre, averer, declarer . . .On a fini

par reconnatre son innocence. 5X Croire (a`);! aussi Rendre hommage*a` . . .On est force de reconnatre des divergences (cit. 1) entre certains

textes . . .Maintes fois, il le reconnat lui-meme, il manquait de bon sens

(! Grain, cit. 26). Reconnatre la superiorite de qqn. 5X Ceder (3.: leceder a`); proclamer . . .Amener qqn a` reconnatre. 5X Convaincre.

Reconnatre que. 5X Admettre, avouer, convenir (de); ! Boiteux, cit. 7;demarche, cit. 4; Dieu, cit. 47; malheur, cit. 39; oracle, cit. 4. Ils ont tous

reconnu quil a fait ce quil a pu. 5X Tomber (daccord). Vous nhesiterez

(cit. 14) pas a` reconnatre que. . . Je reconnais que . . .5X Accorder; entendre

(jentends bien). - Quoi quon dise, on doit reconnatre que . . . (- Canaille,

cit. 12). Force (cit. 58) lui etait de reconnatre que . . . (- Exciter, cit. 32).

Il faut bien, on doit reconnatre que . . .5X Evidence (se rendre a` levidence);

! Melodique, cit. 1.

Turning now to colligational patterns, we find that quite a number of these

have found their way into the dictionaries, but that they are usually treated by

way of lexical exemplification. Here are a few examples from PR:

un mecanicien en herbe (PR; underlying colligation: NP [vocation]en herbe)

de la graine de voyou (PR; underlying colligation: de la graine deNP)etre musicien dans lame (PR; underlying colligation: NP dans lame)


Note that such treatment is doubly limiting. For one thing, it conceals the

generativity of the patterns as well as the limits of such generativity; for

another, it omits to signal typical textual embeddings. Thus, a colligational

pattern such as NP/ADJ a` ses heures tends to occur as an appositive (oftenclause-initial), and this information must be made available to the dictionary

user. Cf. for example:

Poe`te a` ses heures, Guillaume improvisait des vers.

Nicolas, jardinier a` ses heures, dispose dune plantation qui lui fournit la

matie`re premie`re de ses petards.

3.2.4 Other deficiencies resulting from a semasiologicalmethodology. Another point tonote (and one I shall expand upon in the section on translation equivalence

below) is that definitions and sense divisions in monolingual dictionaries

as well as translations in bilingual semasiological encoding dictionaries often

leave something to be desired. Again, this is primarily because bilingual

lexicographers who work on single letters or words often lack contextual,

or more accurately, subject-specific information; even if they have such

information in one language, they may still find it difficult to provide natural

textual equivalents because they fail to avail themselves of the time-honoured

strategy used by professional translators of comparing parallel texts, i.e. texts

which deal with the same or similar subject matter in different languages.

To compound matters, bilingual dictionaries tend to exhibit an empirical

dependency (Kromann 1991: 2714, Hausmann 2002: 1619) on monolingual

dictionaries in the sense that the aforementioned alphabetical framework

is generally grounded on monolingual dictionaries. As a consequence,

interlingual divergences which could emerge from a contrastive analysis are

not normally taken account of.

There is ample evidence from a number of studies of such dependencies.

Hausmann (2002: 1619) shows that OH was the first dictionary to introduce

the notion of tact into its French renderings of the English adjective

insensitive, for the simple reason that its compilers had at their disposal two

new monolingual dictionaries which used tact in their definitions and

provided several examples of its use including several typical collocations.

In similar vein, Cummins and Desjardins (2002) demonstrate that there is

insufficient discrimination in a number of bilingual dictionaries between the

various senses of two English-French pairs ( population/population and plus ou

moins/more or less) to enable correct encoding. For example, French population

has an affective use not paralleled by its direct English equivalent which is

better rendered by nouns or collocations such as people or the (general) public.

Again, it is reliance on monolingual dictionaries which appears to be the root

cause of such oversights.

16 Dirk Siepmann

Another example can be seen in GW (German-English), which renders

the German compound noun Bildungsangebot by the clumsily literal word

combination educational offer. As a study of parallel texts will reveal, however,

the intended meaning is idiomatically expressed in British English as

educational provision (see also Laffling 1991) or training provision, as the case

may be.

While such shortcomings could be remedied fairly easily by consulting

parallel texts available from corpora or the Internet or by developing

algorithms for the automatic extraction of traditionally-conceived bipartite

verb-noun or noun-adjective collocations (cf. Laffling 1991; Smadja,

McKeown and Hatzivassiloglou 1996; Fontenelle 2003), the situation is less

straightforward with extended collocations of the type far be it from me

to INF, vieles spricht dafur, dass (see Siepmann 2005), regarde ou` tu vas ortout se passe comme si (see Siepmann 2004). These collocations are either

absent from dictionaries or wrongly translated because there are usually no

node words on which either the human lexicographer or extraction software

could base their search for an equivalent (cf. regarde ou` tu vas pass auf, wo duhintrittst).5

Take, for example, the discourse marker far be it from me to . . . , which is

common in academic and journalistic prose. In CG this has been rendered by

es sei mir ferne, zu . . .The German expression is untypical of modern academic

or newspaper style and has a distinctly archaic ring to it. For lack of resources

in which to locate a workable equivalent, the lexicographer must have selected

one from the entry for fern(e) in an outdated monolingual German dictionary.

Greater familiarity with academic and newspaper German or reliance on

parallel texts would have thrown up solutions such as es liegt mir

fern zu INF or nichts liegt mir ferner, als zu INF.

4. Potential benefits of the onomasiological approach

My contention in this section is that the adoption of an onomasiological,

collocation-based approach is likely to make the dictionary compilation process

more reliable and more efficient, thereby ultimately leading to more reliable

final products. So far commercially available onomasiological dictionaries,

like their semasiological counterparts, have focussed on single words or

traditionally-conceived fixed expressions (e.g. RO, DO, WE) but they will

really come into their own when collocation is taken into account.

The principal reason why the onomasiological approach is superior to the

semasiological is not far too seek: as communicators, we do not start from

lists of individual words which we then go on to combine in a suitable fashion.

It is not atomised single units, but concepts and processes (Gotze 1999: 11)

that are represented in our brain. The concepts we wish to convey and the com-

municative choices we make are normally expressed either by collocations or,


less commonly, by individual words.6 As pointed out above, collocations are

inextricably linked with, and usually restricted to, some particular topic area

and/or situation-type through what may be described as neuronal assemblies,

i.e. the repeated association of lexical units or semantic-pragmatic features with

a situational or syntagmatic context. In the same way, the lexicographer gains

considerable advantage from focussing on collocational choices within a

particular subject area.

Let us now consider the ways in which the onomasiological approach can

resolve the problems noted above for the semasiological approach.

4.1 General lexicographic principles and the onomasiologicalapproach

We may start by looking at a number of lexicographical stringency criteria

proposed by Melcuk et al. (1995: 33 ff.). They point out, among other things,

that traditional dictionaries fail to describe semantically related lexemes in

a sufficiently uniform manner (Melcuk et al. 1995: 40). As an example they

cite nouns designating nationality. Whereas un Francais is defined as une

personne de nationalite francaise in one dictionary, un Chinois has no

definition, etc. Melcuk et al. (1995: 40) therefore posit the principle of

uniformity, which states that the articles representing phrasemes belonging to

one semantic field must be as closely similar as possible. It follows that,

although their idealized dictionary is alphabetical for reasons of ease of use,

it is ultimately onomasiological since the central concept underpinning it is

the semantic field. Only an onomasiological methodology can guarantee

uniformity of treatment.

Another clear advantage of the onomasiological approach lies in its being

explicit in the sense that nothing is left to the users intuition. As Melcuk

et al. (1995: 3536) point out, a collocation such as magazine feminin cannot be

entered as a mere example because it could theoretically mean either magazine

about women or magazine for women. One wonders, however, whether full

explicitness can ever be achieved when using a monolingual methodology;

as mentioned in Section 2.1 above, many of the nicer sense distinctions in

one language (such as the various meanings of French population) only come to

light against the background of another language. Thus, while monolingual

collocational dictionaries such as OC may well record stream of traffic or flow

of traffic, they do not differentiate between the two senses of the collocation

which become apparent when comparison is made with equivalent German

expressions (in German a distinction is made between flieender Verkehr

into which the road user merges and Verkehrsstrome or Verkehrsfluten

visualised as continuous lines of dense traffic).7 Nor do they take note of

triple collocations such as endless stream of traffic, which may, however,

become apparent from a contrastive search for a viable equivalent of the

18 Dirk Siepmann

German compound noun Blechlawine. See the entry from the projected

English-German bilingual thesaurus in Table 2.

To take but one more example, neither the big four monolingual learners

dictionaries8 nor CR recognize the specific sense that wait assumes in the area

of traffic; a bilingual methodology would reveal this sense since it requires non-

literal renditions such as rester en stationnement in French and stehen or halten

in German (see Table 3). This shows that, in a bilingual thesaurus, explicitness

can be achieved quasi automatically by recording all possible variants of

a collocation along with its topic-specific or situation-specific translations,

e.g. magazine feminin / magazine pour femmeswomens magazine.Likewise, the principle of internal coherence (Melcuk et al. 1995: 36 ff.) can

be readily adhered to in a bilingual thesaurus based on collocations rather than

Table 2: stream of trafc and its German equivalents

English German

stream of traffic / flow of traffic /

traffic flow

der Verkehrsstrom /

die Verkehrsflut

the steady stream of traffic

heading to St Sampsons

die kontinuierliche Verkehrsflut

in Richtung St. Sampsons

(die sich nach St Sampsons

ergieende Blechlawine)

look behind early and move into

the stream of traffic when safe

schauen Sie sich fruhzeitig um

und ordnen Sie sich bei einer

gunstigen Gelegenheit in den

flieenden Verkehr ein

endless stream of traffic /

solid line of cars / heavy traffic

die Blechlawine*

there is an endless stream of traffic

from the Strae des

17. Juni going past the Brandenburg Gate

von der Strae des 17.

Juni rollt eine Blechlawine am

Brandenburger Tor vorbei

we go around a bend and there

ahead of usis a solid line

of cars as far as you can see

wir fahren um eine Kurve und

vor uns ergiet sich eine

Blechlawine soweit das

Auge reicht

Table 3: wait and its French and German equivalents

English French German

I couldnt

wait very long

je ne pouvais pas rester en

stationnement tre`s longtemps

ich konnte nicht lange halten /

ich konnte nicht lange anhalten


lexemes (or lexemes and collocations). This principle states that there should

be perfect correspondence between the definition (i.e., in the case of a bilingual

thesaurus, the translation), the syntactic patterns and the lexical patterns

entered by a lexeme or phraseme; the only problem here is the directionality

of translation, which may lead to a larger number of entries in a bilingual

dictionary, as illustrated by the aforementioned collocation stream of traffic.

When used on its own, this collocation can be translated almost literally into

German in the form of the compound nouns Verkehrsstrom or Verkehrsflut.

When modified by the adjective endless, however, it can be rendered more

elegantly by the colloquial compound Blechlawine.

The problems with the definition of lexemes which arise from the inclusion

of such collocations as celibataire endurci do not occur in bilingual dictionaries

and are in fact purely theoretical, since collocations should be considered as

holistic meaning units. As Melcuk et al. (1995: 37) rightly conclude, the lexeme

celibataire on its own can never have the meaning homme en age detre marie

qui na jamais ete marie et qui veut rester tel although the above collocation

would seem to suggest just that.

Two additional principles proposed by Melcuk et al. (1995) are the principle

of exhaustiveness and that of compulsory consultation of databases.

As outlined in Section 2, the fulfilment of these principles can be greatly aided

through using a bilingual or multilingual approach which should proceed in an

iterative cycle:

compilation of subject-specific corpora in at least two languages !compilation of subject-specific word and collocation lists! analysis of thecontextual embedding of collocations with the help of the Internet !additions to corpora from Internet sources used in context analysis (etc.)

In summary, it could be said that future lexicography should pursue

a methodology which is diametrically opposed to the framework approach

outlined above. Sooner than proceeding from alphabetical lists of individual

lexical units based on monolingual dictionaries, it would be grounded in topic-

specific lists of collocations. The methodology of monolingual dictionary

making would thus also be turned on its head, since monolingual dictionaries

would benefit from the more detailed sense divisions established by bilingual

onomasiological lexicography.

4.2 Other potential benefits

An onomasiological methodology allows us to solve the problem of separating

different meaning units which would normally be allocated to the same article

in a semasiological dictionary. An example of this is the French collocation

20 Dirk Siepmann

donner exemple, which can be used in three different types of situation withtwo different meanings (see Siepmann 2003):

(1) a situation where the speaker/writer wishes to cite another author: Miller

(1995) donne un exemple de . . .

(2) a situation where the speaker/writer introduces an example of his or her

own: pour donner un exemple, je vais vous donner un exemple

(3) a situation where the speaker/writer gives an actual example: lArabie

Saoudite donne un exemple dEtat islamique moderne ( is an example)

The collocation would thus be given at least three entries in different sub-

sections of an onomasiological dictionary. Similar considerations hold true for

English collocations such as avoid an accident (cf. French empecher un accident

vs. eviter un accident) or leave the road (cf. German von der Strae abfahren

[intentional] vs. von der Strae abkommen [accidental]). It is the contrastive

background of a foreign language that allows the lexicographer to uncover the

polysemy of such items.9

Another problem noted above was the placement of collocations within

the dictionary; this can be resolved quite elegantly in an onomasiological

dictionary (or hybrid electronic dictionaries) such as the projected English-

French Bilingual Thesaurus (Bilexicon), where topic area and situation type

are the decisive factor in determining place of entry.

Likewise, in an onomasiological dictionary semantically related or syno-

nymic expressions do not need to be cross-referenced, as they will appear at

the same place in the dictionary. Examples are given in Table 4.

Table 4: Synonymic collocations in an onomasiological dictionary

Synonymic or semantically related

collocations

Topic Area: Situation Type

encore nomme / autrement appele / quon

appelle aussi

Discourse Markers:

Reformulation

dont say a word / dont make a sound /

be quiet / hush / quiet, please / shut up /

wrap up / belt up / put a sock in it

Noise: Telling people

to be quiet

Freizeit-N, Gelegenheits-N, Hobby-N Hobbies: Describing amateurs

when the right moment has come, in due

course, at the appropriate juncture, at the

appropriate moment, when the time has

come

Timing: Right moment

fahren auf / befahren / benutzen / fahren

(trans.) ( Strae)Driving: Road use


The division of labour among various lexicographers can thus be by topic

area rather than the alphabet. For one thing, this solves the problem of missing

cross-references or missing translations for synonymic items; for another,

it allows an allocation of tasks to lexicographers by areas of real-world

expertise rather than the alphabet. Errors or infelicities such as those discussed

in Section 3 can thus be avoided.

Turning now to the problems involved in adequately representing colloca-

tions (especially of the semantic-pragmatic type), we note that the onomasio-

logical approach allows us to adapt and further develop PGF style, as already

sketched above. PGF style indicates possible collocates in both subject and

object position; sometimes generalised labels such as s.o. or s.th. are replaced

by more specific labels such as un animal. A few examples from PGF follow:

qn fait un appel du pied a` qn jd gibt jdm einen Wink mit dem Zaunpfahl

qn conduit qn/un animal/qc quelque part jd bringt jdn/ein Tier/etw

irgendwohin; (a` pied ) jd fuhrt jdn/ein Tier/etw irgendwohin; (en voiture)

jd fahrt jdn/ein Tier/etw irgendwohin

jd schlachtet qn tue [o abat] un animal/des animaux

un animal butine ein Tier sammelt Nektar [o Blutenstaub]

This practice can be further refined in onomasiological dictionaries. The

example of Table 5 illustrates the collocations entered by the French verb

butiner; this is a typical case where an individual word in French corresponds to

a collocation in English (for further evidence of interlingual correspondences

across morpho-syntactic levels, see Part I of this article).

For reasons of space and user convenience, typical subjects of butiner are

shown in the first line of the entry, so that they do not clutter up the following

lines, where the emphasis is on object complementation. In these lines the most

Table 5: An entry for butiner

butiner {une abeille,

un papillon, une guepe, . . . butine}

to collect nectar / pollen {a bee,

a butterfly, a wasp, . . . collects nectar}

une abeille butine (quelque part:

sur les fleurs des artichauts / dans

les pissenlits)

a bee gathers / collects / sucks (up)

nectar / pollen ( from artichoke

blossoms / from dandelions); a bee

gathers / collects honey11

une abeille butine une plante

(pour qqc: pour le nectar)

a bee visits a plant (to collect nectar);

collects nectar from a plant; sucks

(up) nectar from a plant

une abeille butine le pollen /

le nectar / le miel (quelque part)

a bee sucks up nectar / a bee collects

pollen (somewhere)

22 Dirk Siepmann

common specific subject abeille is used consistently, where PGF uses a

superordinate term such as animal. In the case of butiner subject and object

complementation could probably be dealt with in the same way for any number

of language pairs. With some verbs, however, the presentation of subject verbcollocations and object verb collocations may be determined by the targetlanguage. Consider, for example, the French verb craquer and its German

equivalents in Table 6.

This second example shows that complex colligations of the type qqc craque

de qqc must be illustrated with examples to be comprehensible to the dictionary

user. PGF style can also be adapted to variable idioms. In the example of

Table 7, the core meaning is given as a noun entry, while the sentence entries

illustrate different collocations.

Table 6: An entry for craquer

craquer knacken / knistern / knarren /

krachen / knirschen

une branche / une articulation craque ein Ast / ein Gelenk knackt

la chaussure / le toit / le fauteuil /

le parquet craque

der Schuh / das Dach / der Sessel /

das Parkett knarrt

la neige craque der Schnee knirscht

qqc / qqn craque de qqc

{bruits, materiaux de construction, . . .;

jointures}

(etwa:) bei j-m knackt es irgendwo /

an einem Ort knarrt etw.

il craquait de toutes ses jointures alle seine Gelenke knackten / bei ihm

knackte es in allen Gelenken

la maison craque de bruits de

radiateurs et de boiseries

im Haus knackt und knarrt es aus

der Heizung und der Holztafelung

Table 7: An entry for un pave dans la mare

un pave dans la mare eineBombe (die irgendwo einschlagt)

( uberraschende und beunruhigendeNachricht)

cest un pave dans la mare das schlagt ein wie eine Bombe

qqn jette un pave dans la mare /

qqn envoie un pave dans

la mare / qqn lance un pave

dans la mare

j-m sorgt fur Aufregung / j-m erregt die

Gemuter / j-m wirbelt einigen

Staub auf / j-m sorgt fur Wirbel /

j-m lat die Wellen der Aufregung

hoch schlagen


In onomasiological dictionaries, additional economy of treatment may be

achieved by presenting collocations common to a particular semantic field at the

entry for the generic lexeme of the field, a suggestion that has already been

implemented by Melcuk and Wanner (1996: 233ff.) for the field of German

nouns denoting emotion. However, Melcuk andWanner also draw attention to

the limitations of such an approach, given that even closely related nouns do not

share all their collocates (cf. Part I on the arbitrariness of collocation). For ease

of use and memorisation, it may in any case be preferable to give the entire set of

collocations for each concept or lexeme at the entry for that concept or lexeme.

5. Coverage

This section is meant to illustrate by example how the onomasiological

approach can close some of the gaps found in current encoding dictionaries.

It will be seen that even the best collocational dictionaries are far from covering

anything like the entire range of collocation described in Part I of this article.

The section is divided into three parts. The first deals with breadth of coverage,

the second with depth, while the third offers suggestions for improvement.

5.1 Breadth ofcoverage

Within the Bilexicon project, a detailed trilingual investigation was conducted

into general-language items peculiar to one area of the vocabulary familiar to

most native speakers, namely road traffic. It was found that, while offering

a fair number of collocations in this area, OC misses out some very common

ones, such as

an empty parking space, a tight parking spot, a traffic jam clears, double

bend, avoid a traffic jam, the motorway (road) links (Paris) with

(Bordeaux), close a motorway, come off the motorway, open a (new)

motorway, motorway journeys, a clear motorway, a valid driving licence,

take ones driving test, nothing coming (etc.)

Table 8 compares the results for the English noun motorway with the

list of motorway collocations given in OC. The comparison shows that a

large number of collocations which an active user (i.e. a translator or language

learner) might need have been missed out. Numerically best represented in

this example as well as in traditional dictionaries generally are noun noun,adjective noun and noun verb collocations. Equally well covered intraditional dictionaries are fully fixed expressions such as proverbs or idioms.

Among the collocations of type 2 three-item collocations or triples

(Hausmann 2003) are patchily covered, probably because both monolingual

24 Dirk Siepmann

Table 8: Coverage of motorway in OC and in an ideal dictionary

Published dictionaries Additional collocations

from trilingual analysis

NADJ: busy, four-lane (etc.),orbital, urban

NV: join, leave, turn off, build

NN: driving, traffic, network,system, bridge, junction,

service area, service station,

crash, pile-up

NPrep.: along the motorway,down the motorway,

off the motorway,

onto the motorway,

on the motorway,

up the motorway,

motorway from,

motorway to

NADJ: big, large, major (! Fr. grandeautoroute); clear (! G. frei); clogged;congested;controlled; deserted; elevated;

empty; toll-free (! G. gebuhrenfrei,mautfrei)

NV: block, come off, cruise, get onto,go onto, go on, turn off, get off,

pull off, open, reopen

Nmotorway: toll (! Fr. a` peage,G. gebuhrenpflichtig, mautpflichtig),

motorwayN: access, bridge, company(! Fr. societe dautoroute),intersection, journey

(! G. Autobahnfahrt),lay-by, madness, maintenance,

miles, project

(! Fr. projet dautoroute), trip

NPrep.: (be) beside he motorway(! F. border lautoroute)

triples: electronic motorway tolls

(elektronische Mauterhebung), on a clear

motorway, on clear motorway

(! G. auf freier (Auto-)Bahn, auf einerfreien Autobahn), excellent motorway

access, turn a trunk road into a

motorway (enlarge a trunk road into

a motorway) (! G. eine Bundesstraezur Autobahn ausbauen), widen a

motorway to four lanes (! G. vierspurigausbauen), to do a lot of motorway

driving, the motorway links A with B

(! F. relie A a` B)


and collocational dictionaries such as OC exclude many common compound

nouns from their alphabetical framework. Thus, OC records parking as

a participial noun, but does not accord entry status to parking space, thus

missing out common triples such as empty parking space or look for a parking

space. It might be argued that empty parking space is not a collocation at all

but a free combination; this line of reasoning is contradicted by the fact that

the equivalent German collocation is freier Parkplatz (as opposed to leerer

Parkplatz, which corresponds to a deserted / empty car park; see Part I of this

article). This underscores again the importance of an onomasiological

approach, which does not pre-empt decisions on what to include on the basis

of a restricted starting list. To take another example, while all unabridged

French dictionaries enter the expressions cest-a`-dire and en loccurrence, none

of them mentions the frequent co-occurrence of the two.

This brings us to one of the most severely neglected subsets of collocations,

which have been termed second-level discourse markers (Siepmann 2005).

Second-level discourse markers are fixed expressions, restricted collocations

or colligational patterns usually composed of two or more printed words;

typical examples are it is argued that, the same goes for, strictly speaking, force

est de INF, dapre`s ce qui prece`de or with this in mind. Although ubiquitousin both academic and journalistic language, they have so far been paid scant

attention in lexicography. In PR, for example, there is no mention at all

of the various collocations based on the colligation force est de INF( force est de constater / reconnatre / ajouter / . . .). As in the case of cest-a`-dire

en loccurrence, these collocations in turn form their own collocations, which,

unsurprisingly, also go unrecorded in current semasiological dictionaries.

Some examples:

with this in mind let us turn toNP

turning to NPwe find/note that-clause

not clause any more than clause

Patchy coverage is also given to conversational formulae of the type dont

make a sound, do you hear me, I couldnt agree more, look at the time. While

these four examples can all be located in CG or CR, those given in Table 9

are absent from at least one of the two.

5.2 Depth ofcoverage

Turning to depth of coverage, we find that three areas in particular are in need

of improvement, viz. a) triples b) collocational synonymy c) complementation

26 Dirk Siepmann

patterns or semantic-pragmatic collocations. The deficiencies found in each

of these areas will now simply be illustrated with a few examples from the

investigation into motoring vocabulary. The investigation revealed that triples

have been severely underestimated by theoreticians of collocations. Again,

the sheer size of the class, not all of whose members have been reproduced

here, indicates the superiority of an onomasiological, multilingual approach.

Where triples can be used alongside two-item collocations the triples have been

underlined (see Table 10).

Similar observations can be made for colligational patterns. The items in

Table 11 are just a small sample of those which have not been given their fair

share of attention in current dictionaries. Detailed cross-linguistic investigation

also threw up evidence of a general difference in patterning between English

and French which could never have been detected in a monolingual

investigation: in English two prepositions are often used in sequence to

describe movement, whereas French must resort to two clauses and two

different verbs to express the same idea (see Table 12). Finally, it may not be

amiss to illustrate (see Table 13) how the onomasiological approach can reveal

that synonymy, whether perfect or approximate, is not at all rare in natural

languages at the level of complex signs (i.e. collocations).

Table 9: Conversational formulae

English French German

theres no discussion il ny rien a` discuter da gibt es nichts

zu diskutieren

I wouldnt wish it

on anyone

cest quelque chose que

je ne souhaiterais

pas a` mon pire ennemi

das wurde ich

niemandem wunschen

(wollen) / das wurde

ich nicht einmal

meinem argsten

Feind wunschen

just being friendly jai seulement voulu

etre (me montrer)

aimable avec

(pour) toi/vous

ich meine es ja nur gut

this isnt really

aboutNP(pour toi) il ne sagit

pas de INF /NPDir geht es ja gar

nicht umNPand Bobs your uncle et le tour est joue /

et voila` le travail

und fertig ist die Laube

I wouldnt kick

him/her out of the bed.

Je ne coucherais

pas dans le

porte-savon.

Ich wurde ihn/

sie nicht von der

Bettkante stoen.


5.3 Improvingcoverage

How can coverage be improved in future? Since OC was based on a large

general corpus (the BNC), this question is intimately linked to another, namely

whether any corpus can approach the collective linguistic experience of

a language community (Howarth 1996: 72). Clearly, the answer still has to be

in the negative at the moment of writing, especially since most of todays major

corpora are narrowly synchronic, comprising only the last fifteen years or so.

Yet in future very large corpora may well be built which will reflect the

knowledge and experience of language accumulated over several generations.

Everything stands or falls by the size and diversity of the corpora consulted,

so that it would obviously be wrong at the present time to infer the non-

existence of a collocation from its absence from a corpus.

As already pointed out, one way to overcome the limitations of exclusive

reliance on a large general corpus is by using sizeable subject-specific com-

parable corpora (this is the old principle of overall frequency vs. range first

Table 10: Examples of common triples not found in other dictionaries

(English-German)

a busy road / a busy street; a much used

road

eine stark befahrene Strae / eine

viel befahrene Strae / eine

verkehrsreiche Strae

on the open road; on clear roads / on

clear motorways (etc.)

auf freier Strecke; auf offener Strae

outside lane hogging / blocking the fast

lane / sitting in the outside lane

das Blockieren der Uberholspur

winter road clearance der Winterdienst

s.o. changes into first gear / goes into

first gear / engages first gear / puts

the car into first gear / gets the car

into first gear

j-m legt den ersten Gang ein

a good driving road eine Strae, auf der es sich gut fahrt

s.o. goes along a path / a road j-m fahrt (auf ) einem Weg / einer

Strae

the cab went along the coast road das Taxi fuhr uber die Kustenstrae

(fuhr die Kustenstrae entlang)

s.o. uses a road as a rat-run j-m nutzt eine Strae als einen

Schleichweg

s.o. gets into the correct lane / s.o.

selects the correct lane / s.o. moves

into the correct lane

j-m ordnet sich ein

28 Dirk Siepmann

Table 11: Examples of common colligational patterns not found in other

dictionaries (English-German)

a car comes ( verb of motion ing) ein Auto kommt( BewegungsverbPartizip Perfekt)

another car came careering

around the corner

noch ein Wagen kam

um die Ecke gerast

a road has a . . .mph speed limit auf einer Strae ist die

Geschwindigkeit auf . . . km/h

begrenzt/ auf einer

Strae gilt eine

Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung

von . . . km/h

there is a car somewhere ein Auto fahrt irgendwo

there was hardly a car

on the streets

es fuhr kaum ein Auto

shall we go the [place name] way? sollen wir uber [Ortsname]

fahren?

a road takes s.o. somewhere /

a road takes s.o. [distance]

somewhere (through / past /

to / into / across s.th.)

eine Strae fuhrt ( j-mden)

irgendwo hin / eine Strae

geht irgendwo hin / uber eine

Strae erreicht man [(nach)

Distanz] [Ort]

a gust of wind / a bend (etc.) forces

a car / s.o. (somewhere:

off the road, into the crash barrier, into

the path of another vehicle, etc.); . . . forces

a car to swerve (somewhere); causes a

car to swerve; {wind, force of the impact}

pushes a car somewhere

eine Windboe (usw.) drangt

j-mden / ein Fahrzeug

(irgendwohin) ab; der Wind

druckt ein Fahrzeug aus der

Fahrtrichtung; der Wind

druckt ein Fahrzeug zur

Seite; in einer Kurve wird

ein Fahrzeug abgedrangt

Table 12: Cross-linguistic difference in verb patterning

English French

the car swerved (1) across the road

and (2) into the ditch

la voiture (1) a traverse la route et

(2) a fini dans le fosse

the car veered (1) off the side of the

road and (2) several yards down an

embankment

la voiture (1) sest deportee sur le

cote de la route et (2) a devale a`

plusieurs me`tres en contrebas


applied by Thorndike 1921); in addition, all such corpora should be compiled

for several languages. This is exactly the procedure followed in the afore-

mentioned investigation of road traffic vocabulary, which used a specialist

trilingual corpus of around 200 million words and three large general corpora

of around 600 million words. Such breadth in corpus selection will usually

enable the lexicographer to fill gaps in the corpora of one language by

translating an item from another language (of course, the translation should

itself be checked against a very large corpus such as the Internet). To give

a simple example, the French collocation heurter de plein fouet is highly

common in newspaper reports on car accidents, but corresponding English

collocations such as hit with full force / at speed are extremely rare in

comparable English corpora.

Such a procedure is also of great interest to contrastivists, since it enables

them to discover lexical gaps and divergences in colligational or clause patterns

(see above). Thus, the aforementioned study of motoring vocabulary showed

that there is no standard English equivalent for German aus der Kurve getragen

werden or French etre deporte dans un virage; however, expressions such

as wipe out on the bend or veer off the road on the bend may fill the bill.

Table 13: Collocational synonymy in an onomasiological dictionary

English German

driving standards / driving practice /

driving behaviour / road manners

das Fahrverhalten / das Verhalten

im Straenverkehr

s.o. sticks to the speed limit / s.o.

keeps to the speed limit / s.o.

observes the speed limit

j-m halt sich an die

Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung /

j-m beachtet die

Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung

a car turns over three times / rolls

three times / somersaults three

times / overturns three times

j-m / ein Fahrzeug uberschlagt

sich dreimal

s.o. / a car is stopped by the police

(*s.o. is pulled by the cops)

j-m / ein Wagen wird von der Polizei

angehalten (*wird von den Bullen

gestoppt)

a car / a trailer swerves / goes out of

control / wipes out / veers off its

path

j-m / ein Wagen bricht aus; j-m gerat

aus der Spur; j-m kommt von der

Fahrtrichtung ab; j-m gerat ins

Trudeln

a car gets trapped under another /

a car is jammed under another / a

car is left wedged under another / a

car is left embedded under another

ein Fahrzeug verkeilt sich in einem

anderen / ein Fahrzeug ist

eingekeilt unter einem anderen

30 Dirk Siepmann

Similarly, monolingual German lexicography might well overlook such

colligational patterns as Geschwindigkeit auf der Autobahn or Strae, auf der

sich gut fahren lat, whereas combinations such as the compound noun

motorway speed or the adjective-noun collocation a good driving road will be

readily detectable in an English corpus. Of course, such considerations are also

true for the other translation direction (cf. sick note on demand

Gefalligkeitsattest certificat de complaisance; accident involving . . . accident

mettant en cause . . . Unfall, an dem . . . beteiligt sind ).

Finally, it should be noted that, if the aim is to cover collocation as well as

colligation, then it will be impossible to fully automate the dictionary-making

process in the foreseeable future. The reason for this is that such colligational

patterns as NP/ADJ dans lame / en herbe (etc.) cannot be located in even themost sophisticated tagged corpora, since the retrieval software will also come

up with such sequences as NP/ADJ dans la maison / dans la grotte / danslhotel (etc.). Human intervention will thus remain indispensable.

6. Collocation types, lemma types and citation forms

As seen above, a useful distinction can be established between four major types

of collocational relationship. However, the distinction cannot be transferred

as such to the dictionary for a number of reasons:

(1) Firstly, there is no one-to-one correspondence between collocation types

and the three traditional lemma types (one-item lemma, multi-item lemma,

morphematic lemma); long-distance collocations do not fall into any of

these three categories; they also cut across the boundary of categories 2

and 3, as do some two-item collocations.

(2) Any dictionary maker who aims at commercial viability and user

friendliness should at least be wary of representing collocations of type 3

by means of general semantic labels such as [uncertainty] not so. In suchcases it may be wiser to exemplify rather than abstract away from actual

instances. For maximum user friendliness, the example should exhibit

prototypical features of the collocation to be recorded (cf. Harras 1989: 611

on entry words; on prototype theory, see Aitchison 1994). In learners

dictionaries, the definition may help to introduce an element of generality

or abstraction that would be missing in other dictionaries, as witness the

example in Cobuild style (see Figure 1; Siepmann 2005: 318).

Note the pioneering use of broken underlines to illustrate the presence of

long-distance collocational attraction based on semantic features. The same

typographical presentation could be used in any bilingual dictionary. Since

bilingual dictionaries do not normally contain definitions, at least two examples


of each collocation should be given for the user to form a correct under-

standing of its use and to be able to use it productively in a new context.

Accordingly, unabridged dictionaries of the future should contain at least

the three major types of lemmas (one-item lemmas, multi-item lemmas

and morphematic lemmas)10; to this we might add separable lemmas as

representations of long-distance collocations and some collocations of type 3

(see Table 14). As seen in Tables 5 and 6, complementation patterns can be

shown using placeholders such as so or sth or typical representatives of the

semantic class which can be inserted into a particular slot, such as abeille

in Table 5.

7. The limits of translatability

Opponents of bilingual dictionaries or vocabulary lists for encoding purposes

have often argued that such learning materials encourage the erroneous

assumption of one-to-one equivalences between items. The argument is

clearly valid if we equate one-word items such as house and maison or

English population and French population, but it falls apart in the case of

so /sou/(...)12 You can use not so to say that what you have juststated is untrue although it may have seemed probableat first sight. This use is particularly common in writtenEnglish. Some might think Volkswagen, which nowowns 70 per cent of the Czech company, would havethought the Skodas identity problematic. Not so. VWsees Skoda as one of the most recognised brand namesin advertising.

PHR assentencePRAGMATICS

Figure 1: A sample entry for not so in Cobuild style

Table 14: Lemma types

Linguistic Category Lemma type Example

morpheme morphematic lemma un micro-N, ein Hobby-N

lexeme one-item lemma une pomme

collocations of

type 1, 2 and 3

multi-item lemma:

a) colligational

b) collocational

a) N a` ses heures

b) une pomme de terre,

tomber dan

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