Journal article

Publication year: 2010

Pages: 520-548

Journal: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics

Volume number: 15

Issue number: 4

ISSN: 1384-6655

eISSN: 1569-9811

DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.15.4.04gri

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Abstract: 
In our earlier work on three Asian Englishes and British English, we showed how lexico-syntactic co-occurrence preferences for three argument structure constructions revealed differences between varieties that correlated well with Schneider's (2003, 2007) model of evolutionary stages. Here, we turn to lexical co-occurrence preferences and investigate if and to what degree n-grams distinguish between different modes and varieties in the same components of the International Corpus of English. Our approach to n-grams differs from previous work in that we neither use raw frequencies nor (problematic) M1-values but the newly proposed measure of lexical gravity (cf. Daudaravicius & Marcinkeviciene 2004), which takes type frequencies into consideration. We show how lexical gravity can be extended to handle n-grams with n >= 3 and apply this method to our n-gram data; in addition, we suggest a new concept for describing the tendency of a word to occur in significant n-grams: lexical stickiness.

Harvard Citation style: Gries Stefan, T. and Mukherjee, J. (2010) Lexical gravity across varieties of English An ICE-based study of n-grams in Asian Englishes, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 15(4), pp. 520-548. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.15.4.04gri

APA Citation style: Gries Stefan, T., & Mukherjee, J. (2010). Lexical gravity across varieties of English An ICE-based study of n-grams in Asian Englishes. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 15(4), 520-548. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.15.4.04gri