The Phraseological View of Language : A Tribute to John Sinclair

This volume presents the results of the international symposium __Chunks in Corpus Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics__, held at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg to honour John Sinclair's contribution to the development of linguistics in the second half of the twentieth century. The main theme of the book, highlighting important aspects of Sinclair's work, is the idiomatic character of language with a focus on chunks (in the sense of prefabricated items) as extended units of meaning. To pay tribute to Sinclair's enormous impact on research in this field, the volume contains two contributions which deal explicitly with his work, including material from unpublished manuscripts. Beyond that, the articles cover different aspects of chunks ranging from more theoretically-oriented to more applied papers, in which foreign language teaching and the computational application of the insights about the nature of language provided by corpus research play an important role. The volume demonstrates the wide applicability and relevance of the notion of chunks by bringing together research from different fields of linguistics such as theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and foreign language teaching, and thus provides an interdisciplinary view on the impact of idiomaticity in language.

This volume presents the results of the international symposium Chunks in Corpus Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, held at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg to honour John Sinclair's contribution to the development of linguistics in the second half of the twentieth century.

The main theme of the book, highlighting important aspects of Sinclair's work, is the idiomatic character of language with a focus on chunks (in the sense of prefabricated items) as extended units of meaning. To pay tribute to Sinclair's enormous impact on research in this field, the volume contains two contributions which deal explicitly with his work, including material from unpublished manuscripts. Beyond that, the articles cover different aspects of chunks ranging from more theoretically-oriented to more applied papers, in which foreign language teaching and the computational application of the insights about the nature of language provided by corpus research play an important role.

The volume demonstrates the wide applicability and relevance of the notion of chunks by bringing together research from different fields of linguistics such as theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and foreign language teaching, and thus provides an interdisciplinary view on the impact of idiomaticity in language.

I John McH. Sinclair and his contribution to linguistics Preface A tribute to John McHardy Sinclair (14 June 1933 – 13 March 2007) Corpus, lexis, discourse: a tribute to John Sinclair II The concept of collocation: theoretical and pedagogical aspects Choosing sandy beaches – collocations, probabemes and the idiom principle Sinclair revisited: beyond idiom and open choice Accessing second-order collocation through lexical co-occurrence networks From phraseology to pedagogy: challenges and prospects Chunks and the effective learner – a few remarks concerning foreign language teaching and lexicography Exploring the phraseology of ESL and EFL varieties III Variation and change Writing the history of spoken standard English in the twentieth century Prefabs in spoken English Observations on the phraseology of academic writing: local patterns – local meanings? Collocational behaviour of different types of text IV Computational aspects Corpus linguistics, generative grammar and database semantics Chunk parsing in corpora German noun+verb collocations in the sentence context: morphosyntactic properties contributing to idiomaticity Author index Subject index The volume contains articles focussing on the role of prefabricated items in language. It provides both a discussion of Sinclair's seminal work including unpublished pieces of his manuscripts as well as articles from linguists of various fields demonstrating the relevance of this topic in theoretical as well as more applied contexts.