[Corpora-List] Incidence of MWEs

[Chris Butler]

Dear David,

As Adam Kilgarriff makes clear, the answer depends crucially on exactly what
you're looking for, and the decisions you make about what to include. For
estimates and discussion, you might like to look at the following:

Altenberg, B (1998) On the phraseology of spoken English: the evidence of
recurrent word combinations. In A P Cowie (ed.) Phaseology. (Oxford Studies
in Leixcography and Lexicology), pp101-122. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Biber, D et al (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English,
pp990-1024.

Butler, C S (1997) Repeated word combinations in spoken and written text:
come implications for Functional Grammar. In C S Butler, J H Connolly, R A
Gatward and R M Vismans (eds.) A Fund of Ideas: Recent Developments in
Functional Grammar. (Studies in Language and Language use 31), pp60-77.
Amsterdam: IFOTT, University of Amsterdam.

Wray, A M (2002) Formulaic language and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, especially Chapters 2 and 3.

Best wishes,

Chris Butler
Honorary Professor, Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Wales
Swansea

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Brooks" <D.J.Brooks at cs.bham.ac.uk>
To: "Corpora List" <corpora at uib.no>
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 12:42 PM
Subject: [Corpora-List] Incidence of MWEs


> Dear Corpora-folk,
>
> I was wondering if anyone has estimated the incidence of multi-word
> expressions in language. I know that empirical estimates are tied to
> particular corpora, but does anyone have an account of MWEs for
> particular corpora, so that "ball-park" figures of the proportion of
> MWEs can be estimated?
>
> Better yet, can anyone give me a good reference for the incidence of MWEs?
>
> Regards,
> David
> -- 
> David Brooks
> http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~djb
>