In this thesis I examine the collocational behaviour of semantically-related verbs (e.g. head, run, manage) and nouns (e.g. issue, factor, aspect) from the domain of business English. The results of this corpus-based study show that much of the collocational behaviour exhibited by these lexical items can be explained by examining a number of linguistic features and processes which influence the process of collocation. These include the semantics of the individual lexical items being studied, the use of metaphor, semantic prosody, and the phraseological nature of some of the lexical items. I show that it is possible to explain, and therefore teach, certain collocations by considering the linguistic features and processes which influenced the way they were formed. My contention is that if the learner is encouraged to look for an explanation, it makes the process of learning collocations more meaningful and, as a result, more memorable.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:522013 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Walker, Crayton Phillip |
| Publisher | University of Birmingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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