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One of the fundamental aspects of any natural language is the set of words used within it. In addition to knowing how individual words can be combined to communicate meaning, competent language users also know a large number of specific word combinations whose grammatical or distributional behaviour or meaning is idiosyncratic. This research is concerned with computational aspects of one important type of word combination: collocation. There is no agreed formal definition of collocation but it can be informally characterised as a sequence of words that occurs more often than would be expected by chance and whose combination tends to produce an element of added meaning. One of the often-cited characteristics of collocations is that they restrict substitution for their constituent words. This thesis develops a generic framework for the extraction of collocations that exploits this restriction. Experiments exploring the performance of such techniques use frequency counts derived from the WWW as well as large amounts of analysed text from conventional corpora and show that substitution-based techniques can out-perform many existing approaches to collocation extraction. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the many ways in which further research can leverage the genericity of the framework and utilise substitution for collocation extraction.

Background – English verbs are linguistically more complex than nouns and this has contributed to the dearth of in-depth investigation into similarities and differences between their representations within semantic memory and subsequent implications for language processing. However, recent theoretical accounts have argued that verbs and nouns are represented within a unitary semantic system. Aims – This thesis investigates the semantic representations of English verbs with particular attention to how verbs are inter-related as a consequence of semantic similarity. This is achieved through a series of psycholinguistic experiments with healthy adult speakers and an intervention study with adults with aphasia (i.e. acquired communication impairment). Throughout the thesis, comparisons are made to the semantic representations of nouns either directly (i.e. through parallel experimentation) or indirectly (i.e. through the existing literature). Methods – The experiments conducted with healthy adult speakers included: (1) category listing of verbs; (2) typicality rating of verbs within categories; (3) similarity rating of verb pairs; (4) an analysis of verbs’ semantic features; (5) category verification of verbs; and (6) semantically primed picture naming of actions. The intervention study carried out with adults with aphasia compared patterns of improvement in verb and noun retrieval following a semantically-based therapy task. Results and discussion – The results of the experiments shed light on the nature of semantic representations of verbs, in particular, in relation to the similarity between the semantic representations of verbs and those of nouns and also where they differ. These insights are considered in terms of how they provide evidence for or against a unitary semantic system for verbs’ and nouns’ semantic representations and parallel mechanisms for accessing these representations. Two themes emerged in terms of future research potential: (1) the influence of polysemy on speaker’s performance in psycholinguistic tasks; and (2) the nature and influence of typicality within categories/cluster of verbs.

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Hoey's theory of Lexical Priming (LP) attempts to provide a theoretical framework to explain the long-established phenomena of collocation (cf. Firth 1957; Sinclair 1991; Stubbs 1996), colligation (cf. Firth 1957; Sinclair 2004, Hunston 2001), and several kinds of semantic relationships (cf. Sinclair 1991, 2004; Hunston 2001; Louw 1993; Partington 2004). The framework generates a number of hypotheses which call for closer examination. One of them concerns the phenomenon of polysemy. According to LP, the collocations, semantic associations and colligations that a polysemous word is characteristically primed for will systematically differentiate its various senses (Hoey 2005: 81). The claim is further that the different senses avoid use of each other's collocations, colligations and semantic associations. The formulation of the claims of LP regarding polysemy was based on polysemous nouns with two or more abstract senses each (i.e. consequence, reason, immunity) on the one hand, and on the word dry looked at mainly in its use as an adjective, on the other. The present study aims to explore whether the claims of LP with respect to polysemy are equally applicable when other types of polysemous words are investigated. Research consisted in two case studies based on data drawn from a subcorpus of the British National Corpus (BNC) comprising fiction texts. The corpus consists of 432 texts amounting to some 15,000,000 words. The first case study concerned the two most frequent senses -both concrete- of the noun drive (viz. "journey" and "private road"). Findings from this case study confirm the claims of LP. The second case study focused on the senses of the polysemous verb face. Face was chosen for having senses that can be classified along the cline concrete - abstract. There were two main reasons behind this choice: the first was that it was deemed necessary to examine whether the formulation of the claims of LP with respect to polysemy may have somehow been affected by the grammatical category of the polysernous words examined so far; verb meaning relies considerably on a verb's participants and this might generate new insights -and possible challenges- regarding the claims of LP with respect to polysemy. The second reason related to the classifiability of a word's senses along the concrete-abstract cline, and to the question of in how far the claims of LP -as currently formulated- fully account for such cases of polysemy as well. The verb face has a concrete use and an abstract use, illustrated by I do not like coasts that face north and I had to face al/ my problems alone, respectively, and it has uses that appear to merge the two to varying degrees, as seen in the examples below: (1) of little consequence." He turned her to face him. "If I gave that impression then I ea (2) This was yet another of his children to face him in defiance in this very kitchen. Jon (3) not realise then that Rioja had stayed to face the killers. From the hut behind them the Given the claims of LP regarding polysemy, we would expect (i) that face will have primings that clearly distinguish not only between its concrete and abstract uses, but also (ii) that there will be primings that make a distinction among the sub-senses of the concrete, or "directional" use. While the analysis in part yielded results in support of LP claims, it also showed that collocation, colligation and semantic association are not always sufficient for the disambiguation of meaning. Indeed, the nature of the data, very often involving dialogue, called for an application of Burton's (1980) framework for the analysis of casual conversation. Evidence suggests that, beyond the phenomena of collocation, colligation and semantic association, categories from the analysis of casual conversation -specifically, Challenging Moves- can be instrumental in a systematic differentiation between the senses of polysemous words.

In recent years, contradictory advice to teachers has been emerging from studies into the use of semantic links or networks in classroom materials and activities for vocabulary learning in a L2. There is some experimental evidence which suggests that learning semantically related words (e.g., body parts) at the same time makes learning more difficult (Tinkham, 1993, 1997; Waring, 1997; Finkbeiner, Nicol, 2003). There is also a theoretical framework that strongly supports the idea that it is very useful to present words of related meaning together so that learners can see the distinctions between them and gain a complete coverage of the defined area of meaning (Channell, 1981, 1990; Neuner, 1992; Dunbar, 1992). The following paradox appears: while the experimental evidence suggests that semantically related vocabulary does not help vocabulary learning, the EFL coursebook-writers present vocabulary in semantic clusters. The experimental evidence mainly derives from research using artificial language and not a natural L2. The purpose of our research is to investigate which of the two contrasting views will prove to be a useful tool in L2 vocabulary learning. The present study was influenced by action research. It was conducted in EFL classrooms with natural learners in Greece. The subjects were 31 intermediate EFL children and 32 beginners EFL adults. Two different ways of organizing new vocabulary for presentation were employed: a) presenting semantically related words (topic-related vocabulary i.e. mugging, terrorism,jorgery, synonyms, antonyms or homonyms) together at the same time, and b) presenting vocabulary in an unrelated fashion (i.e. carpenter, tornado, sage). Short and long-term tests were administered to the students. The presentation will focus on the main conclusion that semantically related vocabulary impedes L2 vocabulary learning. Adult beginners performed significantly better on the unrelated vocabulary test compared to their performance on the related vocabulary test. Word frequency (in language) when combined with unrelated presentation of new L2 vocabulary appears to make a difference in students' performance.