Publication details
Introducing Word Templates and their semi-automatic derivation from Word Sketches
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | A word template is a concise statement of a word's pattern of normal usage serving as the kernel of a clause. Neither a chunk nor a bundle, it expresses the clause's paradigmatic potential and syntagmatic structure as a string of grouped rationalised collocations and colligations. Word templates revolve around noun + verb collocations. The syntactic roles of the two items in the collocation determine the other potential elements in the template. Unlike work in transitivity, complementation and valency, word templates describe nouns as well as verbs. The patterns of normal usage of nouns deserves more attention than they have hitherto received, especially the abstract nouns used in academic prose. See for example, Gardner and Davies (2013). To build a word template around a collocation, we can invoke the mantra of Functional Linguists: who does what to whom under what circumstances Starting with the collocation, give lecture, we can arrive at the following word template: [Expert] gives a lecture [to students | fellow professionals] [on/about topic] [when | at event] When fully realised in discourse, such a skeleton can be fleshed out with multi-word noun and verb groups and is grammatized with verbal aspect, modality, etc. Even in its skeletal form it has a satisfying psychological wholeness, and capable of invoking schematic knowledge. To derive word templates from corpora, we use the Word Sketches that are generated from corpora by the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et.al.2004). These are single web pages consisting of tables of data about the search word. Each column is headed by a grammatical relationship e.g. Subject, under which its salient collocates are listed. These words can be clustered according to the similarity of their behaviour. The clusters are then named, e.g. Expert, Topic, Event, and become the semantic types used in the word template. The current work is meant to be of value to language teachers and learners who benefit from several layers of linguistic activity at the same time. It is also of value to translators who are writing in their other language. In research terms, word templates are not unrelated to the structures of CxG, some aspects of frame semantics, and are observable in first language acquisition as children move beyond the two word stage. But word templates are most closely related to the Pattern Grammar of Hunston and Francis (1996 & 1998), to the Collostructions of Gries and Stefanovitch (2003), and to the Hybrid n-grams of Wibble and Tsao (2010), However, the most significant contribution is the ongoing project, Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs by Hanks (2010 – 2014). His methodology and formalisms (Hanks 2012) have informed the development of the notion of word templates, albeit for different ends. |