Multiword Expressions

While a wealth of resources is available for teaching research writing of traditional IMRD research papers, instructors have little to draw on when working with graduate students in mathematics. The present study offers insight into recent mathematical research articles through an exploration guided by phrase-frames, recurring multiword units with a variable slot or blank. The paper introduces the concept of key phrase-frames. In doing so, the potential of phrase-frames for understanding subregisters and for teaching is shown. The starting point of this exploration is a 2,289,670-word corpus of 128 recent mathematics research articles collected from eight scholarly mathematics journals. Five-and six-gram phrase-frames were generated in KfNgram. Key phrase frames are identified as those with an occurrence of at least 20 per million words, occurring across 75% of journals and with a sMAPE of 1.95 cut off or higher when compared to the academic section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English as a reference. The 180 resulting frames were coded for open slot position and common pattern before being consolidated and functionally grouped. Core functions related to the aboutness, coherence and moves of the text. The discussion centers on how these groups reveal different aspects of mathematical texts

This paper presents an exploratory study on large-scale detection of idiomatic expressions in essays written by non-native speakers of English. We describe a computational search procedure for automatic detection of idiom-candidate phrases in essay texts. The study used a corpus of essays written during a standardized examination of English language proficiency. Automatically-flagged candidate expressions were manually annotated for idiomaticity. The study found that idioms are widely used in EFL essays. The study also showed that a search algorithm that accommodates the syntactic and lexical flexibility of idioms can increase the recall of idiom instances by 30%, but it also increases the amount of false positives.

Le espressioni multiparola costituiscono una parte fondamentale del nostro lessico mentale, nonché l’oggetto di studio privilegiato di discipline applicative come la linguistica computazionale, la fraseologia e la lessicografia.
All’interno della linguistica teorica, tuttavia, queste strutture vengono spesso relegate alla periferia della grammatica per via delle loro irregolarità semantiche e strutturali e per il fatto di essere, al contempo, un caso «non canonico» e di morfologia e di sintassi.
Nel volume si analizzano le espressioni multiparola della lingua italiana, e in particolare le parole sintagmatiche (borsa di studio, gratta e vinci, tirare avanti, porta a porta), da un punto di vista teorico e descrittivo, mirando a esplicitare i meccanismi che soggiacciono all’organizzazione di questa porzione di lessico mentale e a metterne in evidenza le (sotto-)regolarità.
Per l’analisi vengono utilizzati (e in parte ulteriormente affinati) gli strumenti d’analisi messi a disposizione dal costruzionismo, un quadro teorico che elegge la «costruzione» ‑ intesa come segno linguistico, ovvero come associazione convenzionalizzata di una forma e di un significato - a unità fondamentale dell’analisi linguistica, mettendo quindi in secondo piano il ruolo dei livelli strutturali classici.

The third volume of the “Intercontinental Dialogue on Phraseology” series is a continuation of the project, which was inspired by the symposium "Phraseology 2009" organised by Professor Katsumasa Yagi at Kwansei Gakuin University in Nishinomiya, Japan. Thanks to the participation of scholars from Europe and Asia, the symposium enabled an intercontinental exchange of views on phraseology. The present volume is a result of a two-year cooperation of phraseologists from Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe. The volume starts with the section titled "Dialogue on Phraseology", which contains two papers by eminent phraseologists: Elisabeth Piirainen and Włodzimierz Wysoczański. Elisabeth Piirainen is an internationally recognised specialist in the field of phraseology, focussing on widespread idiomatic expressions, which are also discussed in her paper “Widespread idioms in Europe and beyond: New insights into figurative language". Włodzimierz Wysoczański does research on idiomatic stock of Slavic languages, who takes a special interest in cross-linguistic studies on similes. His paper, "Integralność we współczesnych badaniach frazeologicznych", deals with problems of contemporary analyses of phraseology. The section is followed by five parts, containing topically arranged papers. The first part, "Lexicography, Corpus Linguistics & Phraseology", contains five papers. Kaoru Akasu’s contribution, "On the Three Editions of the Kenkyusha’s Dictionary of English Collocations: A Comparative Analysis", contains a discussion on different editions of Kenkyusha dictionary of English collocations. The paper "Japanese idioms in corpus data and in dictionaries " by Priscilla Ishida offers an analysis of Japanese idioms in corpora and dictionaries. Outi Lauhakangas in her paper "On M. Kuusi’s database, type system and its challenges" presents Matti Kuusi database. Two papers deal with problems of lexicographic description: Alenka Vrbinc focuses on the inclusion of the dictionary presentation of meanings of fixed expressions in her paper titled "Phraseological units and the meaning: How is semantic information included in online dictionaries?", while Joanna Szerszunowicz, in her contribution "Cultural connotations of winged words in bilingual dictionaries", reflects on the place of cultural connotation in bilingual dictionaries. The second part, "General Linguistics & Phraseology", is composed of eight papers. In the paper “Wikipedia at its best – phraseological neologisms in Wikipedia discussions", Sabine Fiedler focuses on neologisms observed in Wikipedia discussions. The paper by Sergiusz Griniewicz, titled "Терминологические аспекты фразеологии", discusses the terminology. Elise Lopez dwells on an important problem occurring in a contrastive perspective: faux amis in phraseology. Her paper titled "A Study of Emic Proportions: Contextualising Phraseological False Friends" discusses the phenomenon in the emic perspective. Munzhedzi James Mafela’s contribution, "On the Phraseology of Tshiven da Idioms", contains a presentation of various aspects of idiomatic expressions used in the Tshivenda language. The paper by Ewa Młynarczyk, "Nazwy narzędzi jako podstawa metonimicznego obrazowania w przysłowiach i w swobodnych połączeniach wyrazowych", discusses the names of tools as a basis of metonymic imagery in proverbs and loose word combinations. Irina Naumova’s interest in the English Influence on Russian is reflected in her paper, titled "English Influence on Russian Phraseology (in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries)", which contains an analysis of its selected examples of this impact. Magdalena Olejarnik analyses fixedness in mixed languages: her paper "Does phraseology exist in mixed languages? – A comparative study of verbal idioms in Standard Swahili and Sheng (a Swahili-English intertwined language)" contributes to the studies on the specifics of their phraseology. Makoto Sumiyoshi offers a in-depth analysis of the phrase Don’t ‘yes, sir’ me in his paper titled "Phrases, grammatical non-compositionality and functions in use: An analysis of Don’t ‘yes, sir’ me!”. The third part, "Ethnolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics & Phraseology", contains eight papers. In the paper "Traffic Metaphors in the Slovenian Language" Sasa Babić discusses how traffic-related issues are reflected in language, especially in fixed expressions. In her contribution "Woman in Estonian phraseology", Anneli Baran analyses how the woman is presented in the phraseological units of the Estonian language. Paola Capponi’s paper, "Forms of Threatening: Variants and Invariants", focuses on the threat as a linguistic phenomena. Elena V. Carter’s article “With An Open Heart: Somatic Idioms In Nikita Khrushchev’s Political Discourse In America" deals with somatic phraseology in N. Khruschev’s speeches delivered during his stay in the USA. The paper by Renata Dźwigoł, titled "Types of laughter – based on the analysis of Polish phraseological units and proverbs", contains a discussion of Polish fixed expression with a view to determining how different kinds of laughter are depicted. In the paper titled "Better working hard than yelling aloud: proverbs, metaphors and slogans in Chinese political discourse", Mariarosaria Gianninoto discusses Chinese formulaic language. Karolina Makowska’s article, titled "Analiza modyfikacji stałych połączeń wyrazowych w wypowiedziach Violetty Kubasińskiej z serialu BrzydUla", contains an analysis of the idiolect of a sitcom character who uses many modifications of fixed expressions. The phraseology of modern media are discussed by Jadwiga Tarsa who analyses Russian phraseological units in her paper titled "Фразеологизмы в Интернете – смесь традиции и современности". Four papers are included in the fourth part titled "The Contrastive Linguistics, Translation & Phraseology". The one by Edyta Koncewicz-Dziduch, "Deskryptywno-wartościujący charakter związków frazeologicznych z nazwami roślin w języku polskim, chorwackim, serbskim", aims to analyse the descriptive and evaluative character of phraseological units containing plant names in three languages: Polish, Croatian and Serbian. A contrastive analysis of a group of idiomatic expression is also presented by Laura Pinnavaia. In her paper "We are what we eat: Analyzing food and drink idioms in English, French, German, and Spanish", she discusses food and drink idioms in four languages. Sunil Sharma’s contribution also offers an insight into a problem of contrastive phraseology. His article "Kontrastive Untersuchung der Phraseologismen mit Gesichtsteilbezeichnungen im Deutschen und Hindi" contains an analysis of somatic phraseological units two languages: German and Hindi. Elena Zinovieva and Aleksiej Alyoshin focus on fixed comparisons in Russian and Swedish languages. Their paper titled "Русские и шведские устойчивые сравнения, характеризующие манеру речи человека" contains the analysis of the ones characterizing a person’s speech manner. The fifth part, "Cultural Studies, Language Teaching/Acquisition & Phraseology", comprises five papers. In the first article titled "Proverbial expressions and cultural context in archive materials" Liisa Granbom-Herranen shares her observations and remarks on using data for paremiography, especially in linguo-cultural analyses of proverbs. Three papers deal with problems from the sphere of language teaching and acquisition. In her paper "Phraseology and foreign language learning", Erla Hallsteinsdóttir offers a discussion on the role and place of phraseology in foreign language learning. Shin’ichiro Ishikawa’s paper analyses the use of phraseological units in oral and written texts produced by Asian students who learn English as a foreign language. The article by Krystyna Nikołajczuk "Najwyższy czas na frazeologię. Nauczanie polskich frazeologizmów o znaczeniu temporalnym w środowisku ukraińskojęzycznym", is devoted to teaching phraseology to learners of Polish as a foreign language in Ukraine. In his paper titled "Realia Nusantary w świetle indonezyjskiej frazeologii", Przemysław Wiatrowski discusses how the realia of a given ethnic community – in this case the Indonesian one – are reflected in phraseological stock.

L’Università di Roma “La Sapienza” di Roma dal 2016 ha promosso il progetto CREAMY (Italo Calvino REpository for Analysis of Multilingual phraseologY) con lo scopo di analizzare tutte le traduzioni prodotte delle unità fraseologiche all’interno delle varie opere scritte da Italo Calvino.
Il lavoro di tesi è strutturato in tre capitoli: un primo apparato teorico, la descrizione del programma, l’analisi pratica delle occorrenze. Nel primo capitolo si è approfondita la conoscenza dello studio della fraseologia e presentate in rassegna le principali teorie sviluppate sulla fraseologia, partendo da Viktor Vladimirovich Vinogradov fino a giungere ai giorni nostri con Gloria Corpas Pastor, che possiede il merito di aver pubblicato il Manual de fraseología española. In seguito si descrivono le tre sfere che costituiscono le unità fraseologiche, secondo la teoria di Corpas Pastor, andando nello specifico: collocazioni, polirematiche ed enunciati fraseologici. Nel secondo capitolo, dopo aver parlato brevemente del Fondo Italo Calvino, si descrive il progetto CREAMY, con la costruzione del sito web creato appositamente da Paolo Bottoni per poter analizzare tutti gli enunciati fraseologici. Infine si passa. nel terzo capitolo, all’analisi pratica, mostrando alcuni particolari esempi di polirematiche, presenti all’interno del testo Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno di Calvino e della sua versione tradotta El sendero de los nidos de araña, curato da Aurora Bernárdez, utilizzando la piattaforma CREAMY. Si è osservato soprattutto il cotesto, cercando di capire come mai la traduttrice abbia scelto di utilizzare differenti polirematiche per tradurne una stessa e osservando le differenze che si possono avere tra la lingua spagnola e la lingua italiana.



The University "La Sapienza" in Rome has promoted, since 2016, the CREAMY project (Italo Calvino REpository for Analysis of Multilingual phraseologY) with the aim to analyze all the Multi Word Expressions translations that have been produced within the several works written by Italo Calvino.
The thesis work is structured into three chapters: a theoretical apparatus, the program description and the practical analysis of the occurrences. In the first chapter the knowledges about the phraseology have been deepened and, lately, the main theories developed about phraseology have been presented, starting from Viktor Vladimirovich Vinogradov up to Gloria Corpas Pastor, who has, nowadays, the merit of having published “Manual de la Fraseología Española”. Thereafter, have been described the three spheres that make up the phraseological units, according to Corpas Pastor's theory, going specifically: collocations, multi word expressions and phraseological propositions. In the second chapter, after a briefly dwell on the Italo Calvino Fund, CREAMY project has been described, with the construction of the website created specifically by Paolo Bottoni in order to analyze all the phraseological propositions. Finally we move on to the third chapter, where we find the practical analysis using the CREAMY platform, showing some particular multi word expressions' examples, present within Calvino's work “Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno” and its translated version “El sendero de los nidos de araña”, edited by Aurora Bernárdez. The cotext was observed mostly, trying to understand why the translator chose to use different multi word expressions to translate one and observing the differences that can occur between Spanish and Italian languages.

Multi-word expressions are linguistic objects formed by two or more words that behave like a ‘unit’ by displaying formal and/or functional idiosyncratic properties with respect to free word combinations. They include an extremely varied set of items (from idioms to collocations, from formulae to sayings) which have been the privileged subject matter of fields such as phraseology, lexicology, lexicography, and computational linguistics. Far from being a marginal phenomenon, multi-word expressions are ubiquitous and pervasive: some estimate that they are as numerous as words in some languages, which makes them as central an issue as words for the understanding of human language. However, their relation with words, and morphology, is by far less explored, not to say neglected, especially in terms of demarcation, competition, and cross-linguistic variation.

In contemporary linguistics the definition of those entities which are referred to as multiword expressions (MWEs) remains controversial. It is intuitively clear that some words, when appearing together, have some “special bond” in terms of meaning (e.g. black hole, mountain chain), or lexical choice (e.g strong tea, to fill a form), contrary to free combinations. Nevertheless, the great variety of features and anomalous behaviours that these expressions exhibit makes it difficult to organize them into categories and gave rise to a great amount of different and sometimes overlapping terminology. So far, most approaches in corpus linguistics have focused on trying to automatically extract MWEs from corpora by using statistical association measures, while theoretical aspects related to their definition, typology and behaviours arising from quantitative corpus-based studies have not been widely explored, especially for languages with a rich morphology and relatively free word order, such as Italian. I show that a systematic analysis of the empirical behaviour of Italian MWEs in large corpora, with respect to several parameters, such as syntactic and semantic variations, is useful to outline a subcategorization of the expressions in homogeneous sets which approximately correspond to what is intuitively known as multiword units (“polirematiche” in the Italian lexicographic tradition) and lexical collocations. These results can be obtained by using an ad-hoc designed tool (whose methodology is fully explained in my work) which is able to investigate automatically the empirical features of MWEs once that a large corpus and a list of expressions are provided.

This paper investigates the presence and use of basic color terms within Italian multiword expressions, in particular phrasal lexemes (e.g. libro bianco ‘white book’, vedere nero ‘be pessimistic’). The starting hypothesis is that most frequent color terms, especially those that are ranked higher in Berlin & Kay’s (1969) implicational hierarchy, are more widely used within multiword units. In order to test the hypothesis, data from the largest dictionary available for the Italian language are gathered, together with semi-automatically collected data from corpora, which considerably enrich the sample. The hypothesis is confirmed: more frequent, ‘higher-ranked’ color terms (viz. bianco ‘white’, nero ‘black’, rosso ‘red’) are found in a larger set of phrasal lexemes as compared to less frequent color terms.

Despite the growing interest of lexicological and lexicographical studies in frozen word combinations, some multiword lexemes are still partially unexplored. This paper focuses on a specific type of multiword lexical units: prepositional phrases functioning as noun modifiers (Multiword Adjectives – e.g. macchina a benzina, medico di turno, uomo in divisa, lavoro su commissione). Multiword Adjectives are extensively used
in Italian and remarkably spread across Romance languages. The analysis is based on two main assumptions: i. this kind of lexemes can be analyzed only considering the simultaneous interaction of multiple levels of analysis; ii. the notion of multiword has a scalar nature and has to be modulated along a continuum of frozenness. On the one hand this study aims at showing that these sequences represent a large and very productive
class of multiword lexemes, sharing the same functions of adjectives. On the other hand, this paper intends to show the morpho-syntactic, semantic and distributional properties of different classes of Multiword Adjectives, using data extracted from a corpus of written Italian language.

Il presente contributo propone un’analisi sociolinguistica delle strutture di negazione postverbale nell’italiano contemporaneo. Nella prima parte si descrivono brevemente le funzioni delle forme coinvolte nella realizzazione della struttura, ovvero i pronomi indefiniti negativi e mica. In secondo luogo, dopo avere presentato risultati di alcuni studi di carattere linguistico e sociolinguistico riguardo alla negazione postverbale, ci si concentra sull’analisi di dati linguistici a cui è dedicato il terzo paragrafo. In particolare, si discuteranno gli esiti di due indagini sociolinguistiche: la prima, effettuata su LIP e CORIS, relativamente alla realizzazione di negazioni postverbali; la seconda, invece, operata su NUNC e CORIS, riguardo alla locuzione "fa niente". Nel quarto paragrafo si raccolgono alcune considerazioni conclusive riguardo al coinvolgimento di fatti di carattere linguistico ed extralinguistico nella realizzazione della struttura oggetto di analisi.

In this thesis we describe and evaluate a tool for automatic generation of translations for multiword English terms into Spanish from a monolingual specialized Spanish corpus, compiled by means of web crawling. The resulting translations may be further used to expand or to revise the existing lexicographic resources, i.e. language for specific purposes dictionaries, terminological databases and translation memories. We evaluate the output with the precision and recall metrics and apply our approach to the small English-Spanish glossary in the legal domain that serves both as a reference dictionary and a source for input multiword terms. We analyze the obtained results and suggest possible solutions to the detected problems based on the theoretical part of this research devoted to the issues of machine translation, the use of dictionaries and corpora (non-parallel corpora in particular) for machine translation tasks, and the works on automatic terminology extraction.

In Construction Grammar, grammar is conceived as an inventory of form-function-meaning complexes of varying degrees of internal complexity and lexical fixity. These complexes range from single lexemes like the verb demur to multiword expressions like the VP sweep x under the rug to syntactic templates lacking any lexical content, like that used to form polar interrogative questions.  Whether we are describing a lexeme, a class of lexemes, a word with highly constrained selection properties (e.g., the adjective blithering) or a way to create a headed phrase of a particular type, we are describing patterns, because in each case we are describing the combinatoric properties of words.  But if we take pattern to mean a recurrent configuration containing some fixed and some variable components—which is presumably the standard sense of the term—only a phrasal template would seem to qualify. A verb by itself does not constitute a configuration, and a fixed expression like call it a day, while arguably phrasal, does not contain any open slots—it is inflexible. So can a word or a word class or a fixed formula really be a pattern? This puzzle is resolved in Sign Based Construction Grammar (SBCG; Sag 2012, Michaelis 2012, Kay and Sag 2012): all linguistic expressions are modeled as feature structures, whether these are signs or sign configurations, the latter of which are referred to as  constructs. The question of what forms the grammar licenses comes down to the question of whether a given feature structure of the type sign is well formed. SBCG analyzes lexical signs and constructs in much the same way: each kind of model object is deemed well formed (or not) according to its conformity to a feature-structure description of the type sign. The repertoire of signs includes lexemes with idiosyncratic valence requirements. The well formedness of a construct is determined indirectly, according to whether the construct’s mother sign conforms to a phrasal sign of the grammar. Because lexical signs and constructs are licensed in the same way, SBCG offers a uniform approach to all of the expressions—both lexemic and templatic—that populate the idiomaticity continuum. This point will be made using two patterns from antipodal points on the idiomaticity continuum, the negative polarity item a red cent and the abstract auxiliary-initial pattern, which captures properties common to numerous construct types in English. A pattern in SBCG is a feature-structure description, whether the feature structure describes a local tree (a combination of signs) or a single sign. Key to this approach is the idea that we can factor out phrasal information from multi-word expressions, allowing independently motivated phrasal constructions like the Head-Functor construction to create phrases from idiom words.

Kay, Paul and Ivan A. Sag. 2012. Discontinuous Dependencies and Complex Determiners. In H. Boas and I. Sag, (eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 211-238.

Michaelis, Laura A. 2012. Making the Case for Construction Grammar. In H. Boas and I. Sag, (eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 31-69.

Sag, Ivan A. 2012. Sign-Based Construction Grammar: An Informal Synopsis. In Hans Boas and Ivan A. Sag, (eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 69-202.

To some extent, we seem to use language in chunks—multiple words that are co-selected and used as gestalt units. By some estimates, these chunks constitute more than 50% of a given text (Erman & Warren, 2000). The extent to which our communication is composed of these units has broad implications for linguistic theory, psycholinguistics, and applied linguistics, and so is the focus of this study. This study shows that claims made regarding the nature of formulaic language (Sinclair, 1991) lead to a method for the automatic detection of holistically used multiword patterns in text corpora, which in turn allows for the estimation of the ‘chunkiness’ of linguistic corpora. These estimates may be useful for materials development in language teaching, as well as corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic studies.

This article investigates the validity of the suggestion that internet television can facilitate EFL learners’ acquisition of formulaic sequences (FSs). A quantitative study was conducted to examine the extent to which FS use on internet television reflects FS use in the everyday speech of English-speaking communities. The study compares the distribution of FSs in a 7.68 million-word corpus of internet television (the iTV corpus) with that in the spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC). The results confirm the validity of using internet television as a resource for the acquisition of FSs that are highly frequent in everyday speech. The fact that the frequency at which FSs appear on internet television is directly proportional to that in everyday speech suggests that internet television might help EFL learners establish an accurate intuition about the frequency of use of FSs, which is shown to be missing by previous corpus studies. The article also provides suggestions about the choice of internet television programmes based on the extent to which the distribution of FSs in each iTV subcorpus is similar to that of the spoken component of the BNC.

Multiword units (MWUs) is a term used in the current study to broadly cover what second language acquisition (SLA) researchers refer to as collocations, conventional expressions, chunks, idioms, formulaic sequences, or other such terms, depending on their research perspective. They are ubiquitous in language and essential in both first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. Although MWUs are typically learned implicitly while using language naturally in both of these types of acquisition, the current study is an investigation of whether they are acquired in implicit knowledge when they are learned explicitly in a process called deliberate paired association learning. In SLA research, it is widely accepted that explicit knowledge is developed consciously and implicit knowledge is developed subconsciously. It is also believed that there is little crossover from explicit learning to implicit knowledge. However, recent research has cast doubt on this assumption. In a series of priming experiments, Elgort (2007, 2011) demonstrated that the formal and semantic lexical representations of deliberately learned pseudowords were accessed fluently and integrated into the mental lexicon, convincing evidence that deliberately learned words are immediately acquired in implicit knowledge. The current study aimed to extend these findings to MWUs in a psycholinguistic experiment that tested for implicit knowledge gains resulting from deliberate learning.
Participants’ response times (RTs) were measured in three ways, on two testing instruments. First, subconscious formal recognition processing was measured in a
masked repetition priming lexical decision task. In the second instrument, a self-paced reading task, both formulaic sequencing and semantic association gains were measured. The experiment was a counterbalanced, within-subjects design; so all comparisons were between conditions on items. Results were analyzed in a repeated measures linear mixed-effects model with participants and items as crossed random effects. The dependent variable was RTs on target words. The primary independent variable was learning condition: half of the critical MWUs were learned and half of them were not. The secondary independent variable was MWU composition at two levels: literal and figurative. The masked priming lexical decision task results showed that priming effects increased especially for learned figurative MWUs, evidence that implicit knowledge gains were made on their formal and semantic lexical representations as a result of deliberate learning. Results of the self-paced reading task were analyzed from two perspectives, but were less conclusive with regard to the effects of deliberate learning. Regarding formulaic sequencing gains, literal MWUs showed the most evidence of acquisition, but this happened as a result of both incidental and deliberate learning. With regard to semantic associations, it was shown that deliberate learning had similar effects on both literal and figurative MWUs. However, a serendipitous finding from this aspect of the self-paced reading results showed clearly that literal MWUs reliably primed semantic associations and sentence processing more strongly than figurative MWUs did, both before and after deliberate learning. In sum, results revealed that the difficulties learners have with developing fluent processing of figurative MWUs can be lessened by deliberate learning. On the other hand, for literal MWUs incidental learning is adequate for incrementally developing representation strength.

This investigation proposes an empirically-based description of a particular type of multiword units which have been observed during the lexicographic design of a database of Italian word combinations (CombiNet dictionary): obligatorily negated multiword expressions. The work here proposed offers a new view on this multiword format, still underestimated within the literature devoted to the topic. On the one hand, the quantitative analysis will reveal different conventionalized patterns of Italian negated multiwords and their productivity features. On the other hand, the contribution aims at exploring the relation between the " falseness " of negation and the lexicalization degree of negated multiword expressions. Furthermore, the corpus-driven compilation of lexicographic records will put forward interesting reflections on the notion of Multiword Lexical Unit, shedding light to a new word format.

In this work, we present the construction of multilingual parallel corpora with annotation of multiword expressions (MWEs). MWEs include verbal MWEs (vMWEs) defined in the PARSEME shared task that have a verb as the head of the studied terms. The annotated vMWEs are also bilingually and multilingually aligned manually. The languages covered include English, Chinese, Polish, and German. Our original English corpus is taken from the PARSEME shared task in 2018. We performed machine translation of this source corpus followed by human post editing and annotation of target MWEs. Strict quality control was applied for error limitation, i.e., each MT output sentence received first manual post editing and annotation plus second manual quality rechecking. One of our findings during corpora preparation is that accurate translation of MWEs presents challenges to MT systems. To facilitate further MT research, we present a categorisation of the error types encountered by MT systems in performing...

This paper describes two machine translation tasks that require language expertise: (1) paraphrasing as a technique to prepare texts for translation and a method for linguistic quality assurance, and (2) the evaluation of translation produced by machine translation systems. These tasks will be exemplified through support verb constructions, a subtype of multiword units that machine translation systems have difficulty translating. The paper raises awareness of the need to integrate enhanced linguistic knowledge in machine translation systems and the need to place the human factor as a core value in order to ensure translation quality.

The present thesis aims to provide an insight from a lexicographic perspective into the problematic field of research concerned with multiword expressions, criteria according to which they are identified and classified, the identification process thereof itself as well as with the state of the art of gold standards used for their automatic identification. After the introductory part, an explanation as to what lexicography is and what constitutes the lexicographic approach shall follow along with the theoretical background of multiword expressions. An overview of the criteria for the classification and identification of multiword expressions accompanied by the set thereof established by the author of the present thesis is the middle part of the work. Finally, after describing some of the current gold standards for the automatic identification of MWEs, PARSEME’s corpora from three different languages are analyzed and evaluated which leads to the conclusion where a summary of everything done is provided together with certain suggestions for future work on the topic.

Keywords: Multiword Expression, Lexicography, NLP, Gold Standard, Automatic Identification, PARSEME

Phraseology is central to specialized language. In scientific and technical communication , multiword terms (MWTs) (e.g. volatile organic compound) are the most frequent type of phraseological units. Rendering them into another language is not an easy task due to their cognitive complexity, the proliferation of different forms, and their unsystematic representation in terminographic resources. This often results in a broad spectrum of translations for MWTs, leading to higher term variation as a result of their composition by two or more constituents. In this study we carried out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of English term variants of MWTs from the environmental domain and their translations into Spanish. The focus was on translation variation and its occurrence in different linguistic resources.

Expressions with an aspectual variant of a light verb, e.g. take on debt vs. have debt, are frequent in texts but often difficult to classify between verbal idioms, light verb constructions or compositional phrases. We investigate the properties of such expressions with a disputed membership and propose a selection of features that determine more satisfactory boundaries between the three categories in this zone, assigning the expressions to one of them.

This paper takes into account a particular set of Italian Complex Prepositions signaling the agent of an action (e.g. da parte di 'by', a nome di 'by'). Italian exhibits several types of complex prepositions revealing a different involvement of the Agent: in particular, these complex lexemes can introduce and distinguish the participants who i) plan and intentionally conceive an action, ii) perform it and/or iii) have a coercive power over its performing. The contribution aims to: i) distinguish these Italian complex prepositions according to their functions, meanings, and the degree of involvement of the participant they introduce; ii) analyze the collocational features and the syntactic environments where these lexemes occur; iii) individuate possible correlations between their frequency of occurrence and the grammatical value; iv) analyze their diachronic evolution across different historical phases; v) put into relation the synchronic restrictions with the original syntactic environment within which the complex prepositions have been reanalyzed.

Este artigo tem o objetivo de discutir sobre o aspecto verbal nas Construções com Verbo-Suporte (CVS) e com extensões de verbo-suporte, focalizando a função semântica que os verbos podem ter quando exprimem aspecto. Para isso, analisamos a relação entre frases formadas com vários verbos-suporte e que diferem pelo aspecto. Por exemplo, as frases Zé (ganhou + está com + perdeu a) coragem indicam os aspectos incoativo, durativo e terminativo, respectivamente. Muito se discute sobre as CVS, mas o aspecto nessas construções ainda é um assunto de pouco interesse entre os pesquisadores no Brasil. Essa pesquisa está embasada no modelo teórico-metodológico do Léxico-Gramática (LG), desenvolvido por Gross (1975). O LG propõe a descrição e formalização dos itens lexicais em tábuas. Dessa forma, como resultado da descrição formal, apresentamos duas tábuas, que podem ser utilizadas no Processamento de linguagem natural (PLN), por meio de programas de computador.

This paper describes the ongoing process of integrating approximately 3,000 predicate nouns into Port4NooJ, the Portuguese module for NooJ. The integration of these resources enables us to further extend the paraphrastic capabilities of eSPERTo paraphrasing system developed in the scope of a project with the same name. The integrated predicate nouns co-occur with the support verb fazer (do or make) and their syntactic and distributional properties are formalized in lexicon-grammar tables. These lexicon-grammar tables resulted in a standalone dictionary of predicate noun constructions and a few new grammars that can be used in paraphrase analysis and generation.

To apply the same approaches to analysing spoken and written formulaic language is problematic; to do so masks the fact that the contextual meaning of spoken formulaic language is encoded, to a large extent, in its prosody. In The Prosody of Formulaic Sequences, Phoebe Lin offers a new perspective on formulaic language, arguing that while past research often treats formulaic language as a lexical phenomenon, the phonological aspect of it is a more fundamental facet.

This book draws its conclusions from three original, empirical studies of spoken formulaic language, assessing intonation unit boundaries as well as features such as tempo and stress placement. Across all studies, Lin considers questions of methodology and conceptual framework.

The corpus-based descriptions of prosody outlined in this book not only deepen our understanding of the nature of formulaic language but have important implications for English Language Teaching and automatic speech synthesis.

This research proposes a theoretical and descriptive study of a set of Italian Multiword Adverbs extracted from a corpus; the corpus-based investigation has been driven simultaneously considering the interaction of distributional and functional properties of selected Multiword Adverbs. In particular, the research deals with prepositional phrases covering an adverbial function and showing a particularly high degree of cohesion between their constituents (Multiword Adverbs-PP), such as: di solito 'usually', a occhio e croce 'more or less', per filo e per segno 'chapter and verse'. The quantitative corpus analysis reveals that this analytical resource is particularly exploited in Italian.
The investigation aims at achieving two main objectives. Firstly, the computational analysis reveals to which extent the distribution of Multiword Adverbs-PP may vary depending on their functional properties. Thirdly, the corpus-based investigation gives evidence of subcategories, according to the distributional properties as well as to the functional values of sets of Multiword Adverbs-PP.

Semantic prosody is typically referred to as an evaluative function of certain words or multi-word items appearing within collocates of positive or negative meaning. The present study deals with the semantic prosody (context properties) of extended lexical units (ELUs) according to the psycholinguistic variables ‘valence’ (emotional positivity), ‘arousal’ (excitement, mood-enhancement), and ‘concreteness’. The object of investigation are the verbal phrases feel blue (unambiguous idiomatic ELU, without a literal counterpart) and see red (ambiguous ELU, idiomatic or literal). The study builds on Snefjella & Kuperman (2016) who propose context norms for English words on the basis of a USENET mega-corpus. For the detection of ELU representations, a questionnaire-based survey was conducted with speakers of American English. For the detection of the context values of ELUs, a corpus research was carried on by using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the News on the Web corpus (NOW). The results suggest that ELU contexts largely conform to the averaged context norms of ELU constituents. ELU representations are strongly dissociated from contexts.

This paper presents our work on the refinement and improvement of the Serbian language part of Hurtlex, a multilingual lexicon of words to hurt. We pay special attention to adding Multi-word expressions that can be seen as abusive, as such lexical entries are very important in obtaining good results in a plethora of abusive language detection tasks. We use Serbian morphological dictionaries as a basis for data cleaning and MWE dictionary creation. A connection to other lexical and semantic resources in Serbian is outlined and building of abusive language detection systems based on that connection is foreseen.

A problem that crops up repeatedly in shallow and deep syntactic parsing approaches to South Asian languages like Urdu/Hindi is the proper treatment of complex predications. Problems for the NLP of complex predications are posed by their productiveness and the ill understood nature of the range of their combinatorial possibilities. This paper presents an investigation into whether fine-grained information about the distributional properties of nouns in N+V CPs can be identified by the comparatively simple process of extracting ...