A Corpus-based Study on Collocations of Keywords in English Business Articles on the European Debt Crisis

A Corpus-based Study on Collocations of Keywords in English Business Articles on the European Debt Crisis Đào Thị Ngọc Nguyên Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành: Ngôn ngữ Anh; Mã số: 60 22 15 Người hướng dẫn: TS. Phạm Thị Thanh Thủy Năm bảo vệ: 2012 Abstract: One of the most problematic areas when vocabulary is dealt with is collocation. It is often seen as arbitrary and overwhelming, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to the attainment of native like fluency. This piece of work presents a study on collocations of keywords within a 20,000-word corpus of various English business articles about the European debt crisis 2011. The aim of the present study is to find out high-frequency words used within the corpus, and above all, to examine collocation patterns of keywords that distinguish the business genre of the selected texts. Concordance Program 3.3 is the main methods employed throughout the study for the data collection and analysis. The major findings of the research are a good number of striking collocation patterns some of the most recurrent keywords possess. The major findings drawn from the research is the basis for the recommendation of pedagogical implications and suggestions for raising students' consciousness of the English collocation acquisition. Keywords: Ngôn ngữ; Tiếng Anh; Từ vựng Content I. INTRODUCTION I.1.Statement of the problem and rationale of the study However, no matter how convinced learners of English in principles of the importance of vocabulary, the vocabulary acquisition actually poses enormous difficulties to them. One of the most complicated problems arising when vocabulary is dealt with is how to combine and use words appropriately in accordance with culture or language conventions, which is often referred to as “collocation competence” (Hill,1999). Collocations are usually defined as words that typically occur in association with other words; in reality, they run through the whole of the English language and they are as old as the language itself. No piece of natural spoken and written English is totally free of 2 collocations. Because of their widespread use, the role that collocations play in the language is absolutely undeniable. For learners of English in general, with collocation competence, they should have the ability to combine lexical (and grammatical) chunks in order to produce fluent, accurate, as well as semantically and stylistically appropriate utterances. For business English learners in particular, a good knowledge of collocation patterns in English is also of great importance. The most important characteristics of the language of business English, as opposed to the language of general English, are a sense of purpose, intercultural dimension and a need for clear, straightforward and concise communication (Ellis & Johnson, 1994). In order to achieve these broad objectives of business English learners, teachers have to find out the best ways to teach business performance skills such as socializing, telephoning, meeting, presentation, and report writing. In all these situations, collocation competence is significantly essential. With the rise of computing power as well as the acceptance of corpus linguistics since 1990s, collocations have received serious treatment. The dramatic rise in processing power of computers now makes it possible to quickly compose lists of frequency for lexical items in a large corpus. At the same time, there have been a large number of different software programs installed for keywords and collocations extract from corpus data. Such software packages have made easier access to the investigation into typical lexical items and their collocations of any particular text genres. With the writer‟s personal interest in collocations as a researcher and observations of students‟ tough experience in dealing with collocations in business discourse as a tutor of business learners, this thesis provides a comprehensive research on collocations of keywords in a variety of business articles written about a currently hot topic for business learners, the European debt crisis. The thesis, therefore, is carried out in the hope that it may be of some help to business learners of English as well as those who find themselves interested in English semantics and collocation-related issues. I.2. Aims of the study The aim of this research is to conduct a close investigation into collocations of keywords from a corpus of a certain number of business articles written about the European debt crisis. 3 To be specific, it identifies words with high frequency of occurrence within the chosen corpus and examines their collocations. The research, therefore, is carried out to answer the following research questions:  What are the top high-frequency words in the corpus of written articles about the European debt crisis?  What are significant patterns and features of collocations of such keywords? I.3.Scope of the study This study is about to discuss keywords and their collocations in 15 written articles about the European debt crisis. The designed corpus of over 20,000 words is taken from online business articles from websites of high reputation such as The Washington Post, Money CNN, ….Keywords chosen for analysis of significant patterns of collocation within the study are those which can distinguish the business genre of the selected articles. I.4. Structure of the thesis The study is organized as follows. Chapter I-Introduction- is firstly introduced, briefly stating the rationale, aims, scope and organization of the study. Secondly, chapter II- Literature review- deals with the literature setting the background for the study. Thirdly, chapter III- Research Methodology- is a presentation on the methodology of the research, referring to the research design, data collection procedures and analytical framework of the study. Next, on chapter IV-Results and Discussion-, a detailed discussion of collocations keywords in the selected corpus is carried out, through which some interesting aspects can be revealed. In chapter V-Conclusion- major findings of the study and pedagogical implications and suggestions are presented. II. LITERATURE REVIEW II.1. Corpus linguistics 4 Corpus linguistics (hereafter CL) deals with the principles and practice of using such corpora in language study. As a branch of linguistics, it differs from traditional linguistics as it is related to the study of authentic examples of language (Sinclair, 1997). The main focus on CL is to discover pattern of authentic language in order to verify a hypothesis about language, for example, to determine how the usage of a particular sound, word, or syntactic construction varies. This, in turn, allows learners and researchers to ascertain related linguistic patterns and structures for the goals of their research. II.2. Sense and sense relations In Nguyen Hoa‟s words (Nguyen Hoa, 2000:56), "sense is a philosophical term for meaning". Meaning and sense are closely related; however, sense is sometimes distinguished from meaning. The meaning of a word is seen as part of the language system whereas sense is the realization of this meaning in speech. According to John Lyons (1995:80), the sense of an expression may be defined as the set, or network, of sense-relations that hold between it and other expressions of the same language. Sense relation is the kind of relationship between vocabulary items when they are arranged in texts, spoken or written: how they are related to one another in terms of their meaning; how they may or may not substitute for one another; how similar or how different they are to each other and so on. II.3. Transference of meaning In English, there are basically two types of meaning transference, namely metaphor and metonymy. II.3.1. Metaphor According to Nguyen Hoa (2004:105), "metaphor is the transference of meaning from one object to another based on the similarity between these two objects". Traditionally, metaphors have been viewed as implicit comparisons. II.3.2. Metonymy According to Nguyen Hoa (2004:112), metonymy can be defined as "the substitution of one word for another with which it is associated". Thus, metonymy works by continuity rather than similarity, which means that instead of the name of one object or notion we use the name of another because these objects are associated or closely related. According to Lyons (1995:314), body parts are favourite sources of metonymy, and many such expressions have been incorporated into the language, with words like hand, heart, head as in have a hand in, bear one's heart, or keep your head. 5 II.3.3. Other types of meaning transference Besides metaphor and metonymy, there are other types of meaning transference involving hyperbole, litotes, irony, and euphemisms. II.4. Collocation II.4.1. Definition of collocation Different linguists have different definitions of collocation. Moira Runcie in Oxford Collocation Dictionary gives a general definition in which collocation is defined as the way words combine in a language to produce natural-sounding speech and writing. To a native speaker, these combinations are highly predictable; to a learner they are anything but. Specifically speaking, Chitra Fernando, Richards and others (1996:62) states that collocation refers to the restrictions on how words can be used together, for examples which prepositions are used with particular verbs or which verbs and nouns are used together. In Kjellmer (1994:xiv & xxxiii), collocation is "such recurring sequences of items as are grammatically well formed". Kathleen R. McKeown and Dragomir R. Radev in their paper on Collocations regard collocations as word pairs and phrases that are commonly used in language with no general syntactic or semantic rules applied. Additionally, many linguists have tried to define collocation by presenting its functions. Halliday (1966) and Sinclair (1966) introduced the notion that patterns of collocation can form the basis for a lexical analysis of language alternative to, and independent of, the grammatical analysis. They regarded the two levels of analysis as being complementary, with neither of the two being subsumed by the other. Holding the same idea, McIntosh (1961:328) and Mitchell (1971) presented the lexical and grammatical analyses as interdependent: "Collocations are to be studied within grammatical matrices which in turn depend for their recognition on the observation of collocation similarities" (Mitchell, 1971:65). Later, Halliday (1966:151&157) argued that the collocation patterns of lexical items can lead to generalization at the lexical level. Sinclair (1966:412 & 1974:16) proposed that a lexical item can be defined from its collocation pattern. II.4.2. Properties of collocation II.4.2.1. Collocation is arbitrary. In the first place, collocation is typically characterized as arbitrary, which means that words are often combined with each other without any particular reasons. II.4.2.2. Collocation is language-specific. Secondly, collocation is language-specific as is nature persists across languages. As Larson (1984:141) points out, every language interprets the physical worlds in its own way and has its own convention; therefore, it governs different collocability of words. For 6 instances, in French, the phrase régler la circulation is used to refer to a policeman who directs traffic, the English collocation. In Russian and German, the direct translation of regulate is used; only in English is direct used in place of regulate. Similarly, American and British English exhibit differences in similar phrases. Thus, in American English one says set the table and make a decision; whereas in British English, the corresponding phrases are lay the table and take a decision. II.4.2.3. Collocation is recurrent in context. While the two properties mentioned above indicate difficulties in determining what is an acceptable collocation, on the positive side it is clear that collocation occurs frequently in similar contexts. It is possible to observe collocations in samples of language. Generally, collocations are those word pairs which occur frequently together in the same environment, but do not include lexical items which have a high overall frequency in language. This property, in fact, has exploited by many researchers in natural language processing in identify collocation automatically. II.4.3. Classifications of collocation By examining a huge number of collocates of the same syntactic category, Kathleen R. McKeown and Dragomir R. Radev in their paper on Collocations identify similarities and differences in their behavior. Distinctions are made between grammatical collocations and semantic collocations. In their opinion, grammatical collocations often contain prepositions, including paired syntactic categories such as verb + preposition, adjective + preposition, and noun + preposition. In these cases, the open-class word is called the base and determines the words it can collocate with, the collocation indicator. Semantic collocations are lexically restricted word pairs, where only a subset of the synonyms of the collocation indicator can be used in the same lexical context. In Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary(Moira Runcie:2002) collocation is classified both in terms of the grammatical pattern and the strength of collocation. Firstly, according to the grammatical pattern, there exist thirteen types of collocations as follows, including: adjective + noun, quantifier + noun, verb + noun, noun + noun, preposition + noun, noun + preposition, adverb + verb, verb + verb, verb + preposition, verb + adjective, adverb + adjective, and adjective + preposition. Secondly, according to the strength of collocation, collocations are categorized into four types: unique collocations, strong collocations, medium-strength collocations, and weak collocations. 7 III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY III.1 Data collecting instruments III.1.1 Construction of Corpus Since the study is primarily a corpus-based analysis of collocations, its findings come from a linguistic analysis of a substantial number of written articles. The corpus of the study is constructed from 15 extracted articles from four databases. III.1.1.1 Database The database in this thesis refers to the set of publications from which articles for analysis have been extracted. It consists of the following journals: the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, CNNmoney.com, and Bloomberg.com. The mentioned- above newspapers were chosen to serve as the database for the study because of their reliability and reputation for famous authors, prestige presses and worldwide use in the world of economy. III.1.1.2 Extracted business articles As mentioned above, 15 articles were extracted from the sample publications with a view to identifying, then examining keywords with high-frequency of occurrence and their collocation patterns. The selected articles are all written about the European debt crisis in 2011, providing readers with up-to-date features, critical and systematical analysis of the crisis-related aspects. The following table summarizes the corpus used in the study, including databases and the extracted texts. A detailed referencing of each selected text can be found in Appendix. Table 1: List of the selected articles Database Information of the Articles (Author, Date of publication, Title) Average Text Length Washington Post Ezra Klein (8 May 2011) Everything You Need to Know about the European Debt Crisis in One Post 1392 words Louis Cooper (3 Aug 2011) Debt Crisis in Europe: Worries Grow of Spread to Larger Economies of Italy, Spain 527 words Alex Witt (05 Feb 2011) Debt Crisis Unsettles European Economy 1024 words Money.cnn Ben Rooney (26 Nov 2011) Europe’s Debt Crisis: Five Things You Need to Know 1420 words 8 Ben Rooney (1 Feb 2011) Europe’s Debt Crisis: Where Things Stand 1075 words Ben Rooney (14 Nov 2011) Europe: New Leaders, Same Debt Crisis 723 words (6 Jan 2011) Europe’s Debt Crisis: No Clear End in Sight 817 words (24 Apr 2011) Europe’s Debt Crisis Rears Its Ugly Head 1188 words Bloomberg Simon Johnson (23 Jan 2011) Europe’s Debt Crisis is Still Likely to End Badly 902 words Peter Stanners (8 Jan 2011) A Short Summary of the Sovereign Debt Crisis 1402 words The Guardian Larry Elliot, Heather Stewards and John Hooper (9 Nov 2011) European Debt Crisis Spiraling Out of Control 1383 words (9 Aug 2011) Debt Crisis: A Default in Europe Could Benefit Poor Countries 2226 words (10 Feb 2011) European Debt Crisis Pitches Germany against Greece 450 words The New York Times Donna Rogers (02 Dec 2011) An Overview of the European Debt Crisis 806 words Hannelore Foerster (26 Aug 2011) European Debt Crisis 5748 words Total Corpus Length 21,083 words III.1.2 Concordance Program Concordance Program is a computer program that is helpful to the corpus linguist. It is used to create word lists, count word frequency, compare different usages of a word, analyze keywords, and find phrases and idioms. The Concordance Program is a general- purpose working tool for studying of text, whether the text is literary, linguistic, historical, philosophical, legal, commercial, and political or of other kinds. In this study, the Concordance Program 3.3 was used to search for high-frequency words and their collocations in the corpus of business articles. III.2 Data collecting procedures 9 The research was conducted in the following steps. Firstly, articles written about the European debt crisis in 2011 were copied from the websites of selected newspapers and journals, and saved as Plain Text. Next, dates, titles, and the names of author in the articles were deleted from the Text. Only the articles bodies were left for analysis. The corpus was then fully developed from the completed Plain Text file. Finally, the Concordance Program 3.3 was used to investigate the constructed corpus. From the made full concordance, results and findings of the research were taken out for analysis. IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The data of the study are interpreted in the following steps. To begin with, analyses of the corpus are conducted using the Concordance Program 3.3, available in website: www.concordancesoftware.co.uk. To get the quantitative results, 100 words with highest percentage of occurrence are listed in tables with reference to their rank and relative frequency. Out of those 100 lexis, the top 25 content words are selected, from which keywords are brought out for full analysis. A keyword is one which has unusually high, or low, frequency in comparison to a base reference corpus (Berber Sardinha, 1999) and thus may characterize a text or a genre (Scott, 2009). Within this study, keywords are recurrent and candifferentiate the business genre of the chosen articles. However, as this is a corpus-based study on collocations, frequency alone may not be adequate; some measures of collocation strength is also required. Thanks to the relatively small dimensions of the corpus, a close reading of the texts could be undertaken both manually and by computer. Therefore, in the next step, concordance of the keywords is scanned in order to bring an overview of collocation patterns of keywords. From that, final decision about target words for analysis is given to those with a wide and remarkable range of collocations. Once the target keywords are identified, an in-depth investigation into different collocates of the words will be carried out. The investigation, in turn, is diversified as collocations are examined as regards their every possible semantic and syntactic feature. For example, various senses of a word in different collocations can be interpreted through careful definition of phrases it involve, through comparisons with words convey the same meanings, or by the researcher‟s illustrating example sentences or contexts. IV.1 Quantitative Results Research question 1: What are the top high-frequency words in the corpus of written business articles about the European debt crisis 2011? 10 Table 2 below illustrates frequencies of the first 100 words in the corpus of well over 20,000 words from 15 selected written articles about the debt crisis in Europe in 2011. Table 2: Top 100 high-frequency words from the constructed corpus N Word Freq % N Word Freq % 1 THE 1402 6.676 51 NEW 56 0.267 2 TO 763 3.633 52 OUT 56 0.267 3 OF 592 2.819 53 IF 55 0.262 4 AND 452 2.152 54 BANK 54 0.257 5 A 449 2.138 55 ALSO 53 0.252 6 THAT 301 1.433 56 EUROPE 53 0.252 7 FOR 214 1.019 57 BONDS 51 0.243 8 DEBT 179 0.852 58 MARKETS 50 0.238 9 IS 176 0.838 59 FUND 49 0.233 10 ON 149 0.709 60 ECONOMY 47 0.224 11 EUROPEAN 148 0.705 61 LEADERS 46 0.219 12 AS 142 0.676 62 ABOUT 45 0.214 13 BE 142 0.676 63 BEEN 43 0.205 14 GREECE 124 0.590 64 HAD 43 0.205 15 IT 124 0.590 65 PERCENT 43 0.205 16 BY 122 0.581 66 THERE 43 0.205 [...]... crisis at the root of the crisis solution to the crisis infection for the crisis prospect of the crisis phase of the crisis resolution of the crisis severity of the crisis a cure-all for the crisis 19 sense of the crisis before the crisis during the crisis in a state of crisis in crisis Table 11: Other patterns of DEBT in the corpus rating of debt billion of debt form of debt amounts of debt purchases of. .. was written about Some of other examples are continuing, looming, rising, growing, ongoing and so on While most of the adjectives in Table 4and Table 5are widely used, some of the words should be focused for attention as when in collocation with CRISIS and DEBT such as immediate, unshakable, or bad, which may convey such meaning that causes confusion among learners A look at the nominal collocations. .. it‟ (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English) , in all other combinations, CRISIS functions as the object of the preposition in a prepositional phrase In many cases, these prepositional phrases, for example infection of the crisis, a cure-all for the crisis, and resolution to the crisis, play the role of post-modifier in another noun phrase IV.2.2 ECONOMIC With total frequency of 63 (0.300%), ECONOMIC... it also points out the practical application of corpus linguistics in the teaching and learning of collocations for ESP courses Therefore, it is recommended that further research be taken in the construction of specific corpora, such as, banking and finance, marketing, or accounting, to be available among ESP teachers and learners for exploitation References Berber Sardinha, T (1999) Using Keywords in. .. genre; the objectiveness and concision must be guaranteed in the provision of factual information in business articles in order to accurately report the issues Table 4: Adjectives collocating with CRISIS financial immediate looming possible ongoing underlying economic sovereign mounting full-blown continuing growing potential imminent slow-moving unshakable full -on European Adjectives in the combinations... reflecting the fact that the three countries Greece, Italy, and Spain are among the most unfortunate victims of the crisis IV.2 Collocation analysis of content keywords Research question 2: What are significant patterns of collocations of the content keywords from the corpus? 13 IV.2.1 DEBT and CRISIS DEBT and CRISIS are the top high-frequency content words of business genre among all the words in the. .. the same time .The analysis of collocations of the four selected keywords in the corpus provides interesting information about their semantic and syntactic features In discussion of syntax, collocations under study are noticeable a variety of compounds of some types such as headed and verbal compounds, and composite nominal with the modifications in heads, or the coordination in modifiers Considering... For all things mentioned, the researcher can come to a conclusion that there is a close connection between the theme of a specialized corpus and the language choice in the articles The corpus theme and its business genre influence types of collocates that the keywords take; 25 these collocations, in turn, accurately reflect the theme and distinguish the genre This connection helps create and guarantee... problems, debt load and more, in which CRISIS and DEBT function as modifiers and the nouns are heads The other groups of combinations, consisting of crisis management, crisis response ,debt restructuring, debt payment, debt reduction, debt repudiation, debt write-downs; on the other hand,can be considered verbal compounds These compounds are related to syntactic phrases, as in: (crisis management) manage the. .. slowdown and so on This predominance, in turn, can be representative of the constructed corpus as the central topic- the debt crisis- in itself contains lots of „ups and downs‟ The use of these nominal collocates also reveals the presence of a metaphor of ECONOMY AS A LIVING ORGANISM The state of the economy is a state of physical health (lexis include malaise, recovery, growth) or of mental health (with . grammatical collocations and semantic collocations. In their opinion, grammatical collocations often contain prepositions, including paired syntactic categories such as verb + preposition, adjective. (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English) , in all other combinations, CRISIS functions as the object of the preposition in a prepositional phrase. In many cases, these prepositional phrases,. experience in dealing with collocations in business discourse as a tutor of business learners, this thesis provides a comprehensive research on collocations of keywords in a variety of business articles