USING LANGUAGE CORPORA IN BUILDING LEARNER’S COMBINATORIAL DICTIONARIES

Abstract

The article deals with the problems of using corpus data in educational lexicography. The data from traditional collocations dictionaries, such as the Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English, are compared with the data extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC). The BNC is an approximately 100-million-word corpus of written and spoken British English (it is considered as a balanced corpus that contains texts from a wide range of different language genres and text domains). A corpus manager (a web-based tool for searching and retrieving lexical, grammatical and textual data) was employed in the study. Due to this it has become possible to analyze the data, generating frequency information, concordances (i.e. lists of all of the occurrences of a particular search term in a corpus, presented within the context in which they occur), keywords, collocations or carrying out statistical tests. In addition, the data from Dictionnaire des combinaisons de mots are compared with the data from the corpus-based electronic dictionary Antidote of the Canadian software company Druid informatique. This program comprises multiple dictionaries placed within a unified interface. The entry for each word displays its pronunciation, inflected forms, etymology, etc. along with their respective frequency. A frequency index is provided for each word; it indicates the relative frequency of the word in the six billion-word corpus. The presence of a dictionary of collocations that provides all the most significant combinations of the entry word with other words (functioning either as leading or dependent components), grouped by their syntactic function in the sentence and frequency is the most valuable feature of this program. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that it demonstrates the educational potential of corpus data in lexicography, in particular, in the field of compiling collocation dictionaries. The specific examples show how linguistic corpora can help comprehend the semantic, stylistic and syntactic specific features of words. The paper concludes that corpus data has many advantages over traditional dictionaries; at the same time, the limitations of corpus data in syntactic and semantic analysis are noted. In conclusion, the authors outline a project for developing a corpus-based pedagogical dictionary for students of Russian. © 2023 The Author(s).