[Corpora-List] Frequency list of phrasal verbs in English

[William Mann]

Dear Mark:

Two resources come to mind immediately:

There is a dictionary of Collocations of English, from Longman's.  It is a
couple of inches thick and should provide a much larger stock of cases for
your study.

The work of Igor Melcuk, a Russian linguist now working in Canada, provides
a systematics of collocations.  See his home page:
http://www.fas.umontreal.ca/ling/olst/melcuk/

 Using his approach to lexical functions, you can identify 50 or more
categories, and you can generate unlisted cases that are ordinary productive
parts of English.

On his home page he lists this:

 I. Mel'cuk (1998) Collocations and Lexical Functions. In A.P. Cowie (ed.):
Phraseology. Theory, Analysis, and Applications, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
23-53.

Happy studies.

Bill Mann


----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Davies" <Mark_Davies at byu.edu>
To: <corpora at hd.uib.no>
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 9:12 AM
Subject: [Corpora-List] Frequency list of phrasal verbs in English


| I'm looking for frequency listings of phrasal verbs in English (preferably
in electronic form).  I'm aware of the thread on phrasal verbs on CORPORA
this past May, but that referred mainly to the methodological issue of how
to count phrasal verbs, rather than pointers to actual lists.
|
| I've created a very basic list based on the BNC, but it is only a very
initial attempt.  I have a relational database containing the frequency of
all of the bigrams in the BNC (along with their POS and lemma), and ran a
query to match this up with a list of about 7000 phrasal verbs.
|
| The problem is that while it could count cases like "let down", "letting
down", etc for each of the 7000 phrasal verbs, it couldn't handle
discontinuous units ("Bill let THE OTHERS down on the project"), or
non-opaque uses of the same phrases ("Bill let the others DOWN THE SIDE of
the wall").  These are some of the issues raised in the previous thread on
CORPORA.
|
| Anyway, my hope is that someone else might have already created such a
frequency list, taking into account discontinuous units and non-opaque uses.
I'd appreciate any pointers to such a list, and would be happy to summarize
the responses, if there is sufficient interest. Thanks in advance.
|
| Mark Davies
| Brigham Young University
| http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu
|
|