[Corpora-List] Patrick J. Duffley (Universit é Laval) at Aston University

[Ramesh Krishnamurthy]

INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
ASTON UNIVERSITY

Dear colleagues,

On March 7, at 16h30, in room MB750, the 
Institute for the Study of Language and Social 
Sciences will have the pleasure of welcoming 
Patrick J. Duffley (Université Laval). Patrick will give a talk on
The needle in the haystack: what statistically 
infrequent usage can reveal about linguistic constructions

This paper will defend the claim that in some 
cases one can gain a deeper understanding of 
linguistic constructions by looking at less 
frequent uses than by looking at common ones. If 
one only considers frequent uses, moreover, the 
temptation is to propose a distributional 
account, as in the construction grammar approach, 
which uses frequency or measures of collocational 
strength based on frequency in order to identify 
constructions, and defines the components of a 
construction in terms of the whole structure, 
rather than defining the whole in terms of the 
parts. This amounts however merely to a 
reformulation of the distributional correlations 
observed in the data and has nothing to offer in 
the way of explaining why it is one form rather 
than another which occurs in a given construction.

The talk will be based on Patrick's latest book, 
The English Gerund-Participle: A Comparison with the Infinitive.
http://www.peterlang.com/Index.cfm?vLang=E&vSiteID=1&vSiteName=BookDetail%2Ecfm&VID=66399&
All are warmly welcome.


Ramesh Krishnamurthy

Lecturer in English Studies, School of Languages 
and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
[Room NX08, North Wing of Main Building] ; Tel: 
+44 (0)121-204-3812 ; Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766
http://www.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr.jsp

Project Leader, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network): http://corpus.aston.ac.uk/ 
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