A corpus based study on collocations of keywords in english business articles about the european debt crisis

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI University of languages and international studies Faculty of post-graduate studies ĐÀO THỊ NGỌC NGUYÊN A corpus-based study on collocations of keywords

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI University of languages and international studies

Faculty of post-graduate studies ĐÀO THỊ NGỌC NGUYÊN

A corpus-based study on collocations of keywords in English business articles

ABOUT THE EUROPEAN DEBT CRISIS

(Nghiên cứu tập hợp cụm từ của các từ khóa trong các bài báo tiếng

Anh kinh tế về cuộc khủng hoảng nợ châu Âu)

M.A COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15

Hanoi - 2012

TABLE OF CONTENT

Declaration i

Abstract ii

Acknowledgement iii

List of tables vii

List of figures ix

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION 1

I.1 Statement of the problem and rationale of the study 1

I.2 Aims of the study 2

I.3 Scope of the study 3

I.4 Organization 3

CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW 4

II.1 Corpus linguistics 4

II.2 Sense and sense relations 6

II.3 Transference of meaning 7

II.3.1 Metaphor 7

II.3.2 Metonymy 8

II.3.3 Other types of meaning transference 9

II.4 Collocations 10

II.4.1 Definitions of collocations 10

II.4.2 Properties of collocations 12

II.4.2.1 Collocations are arbitrary 13

II.4.2.2 Collocations are language-specific 13

II.4.2.3 Collocations are recurrent in context 14

II.4.3 Classifications of collocations 15

CHAPTER III: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 17

III.1 Data collection instrument 17

III.1.1 Construction of corpus 17

III.1.1.1 Database 17

III.1.1.2 Extracted business articles 19

III.1.2 Concordance program 20

III.2 Data collection procedures 21

CHAPTER IV: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 22

IV.1 Quantitative results 23

IV.2 Collocation analysis of content keywords 26

IV.2.1 DEBT and CRISIS 26

IV.2.2 ECONOMIC 44

IV.2.3 MARKETS 50

Chapter V: CONCLUSION 57

V.1 Major findings 57

V.2 Pedagogical implications and suggestions 59

V.2.1 Improving collocation competence among language learners 59

V.2.2 Corpus-based activities for learner‘s collocation development in ESP class 62

V.3 Suggestions for further studies 67

REFERENCES 68

APPENDIX

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: List of the selected articles

Table 2: Top 100 high-frequency words from the constructed corpus Table 3: First 25 keywords from the corpus

Table 4: CRISIS Concordance (Adjective collocations)

Table 5: Adjectives collocating with CRISIS

Table 6: DEBT Concordance (Adjective collocations)

Table 7: Adjectives collocating with DEBT

Table 8: CRISIS Concordance (Noun collocations)

Table 9: DEBT Concordance (Noun collocations)

Table 10: Nouns collocating with CRISIS

Table 11: Nouns collocating with DEBT

Table 12: CRISIS Concordance (Verb collocations)

Table 13: DEBT Concordance (Verb collocations)

Table 14: Verbs collocating with CRISIS

Table 15: Verbs collocating with DEBT

Table 16: Other patterns of CRISIS in the corpus

Table 17: Other patterns of DEBT in the corpus

Table 18: ECONOMIC Concordance (Noun collocations)

Table 19: Nouns collocating with ECONOMIC in the corpus

Table 20: Composite nominal containing ECONOMIC (with modification within the head) Table 21: Composite nominal containing ECONOMIC (with coordination in the modifier)

Table 22: MARKETS Concordance (markets as ‗the total amount of trade in a particular kind

of goods‘)

Table 23: MARKETS Concordance (markets as ‗people who buy and sell goods in

competition with each other‘)

Table 24: MARKETS Concordance (markets as ‗a particular country, area or section of

population that might buy goods‘)

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Concordance Program‘s main screen

Figure 2: String matching of CRISIS from the corpus

Figure 3: String matching of DEBT from the corpus

Figure 4: String matching of ECONOMIC from the corpus Figure 5: String matching of MARKETS from the corpus

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION I.1.Statement of the problem and rationale of the study

The importance of vocabulary in language learning has always and long been recognized, although there were times when vocabulary was treated as separated from grammar and skills However, under the light of recent studies, vocabulary has even gained much more attention Essential and crucial as it has become, vocabulary has been highlighted as the basis of language and communication Wilkins, an outstanding British linguist, once stated "without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed" Obviously, a rich knowledge of vocabulary not only makes one's ability of using the language recognized and appreciated but also makes him or her be more successful in communication

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 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 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-Theoretical Background- deals with the theories 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 data analysis procedures 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

CHAPTER II

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

This chapter is going to deal with the theories setting the background for the research on collocations of keywords in business articles about the European debt crisis 2011 under the light of corpus linguistics In the first place, an overview of corpus linguistics is presented, followed by the theories of sense and sense relation Then, the literature about transference of meaning is overviewed The chapter will be closed with a presentation on collocation in an effort to provide a partial answer to three questions "What is collocation?", "What are properties of collocation that surface repeatedly across the literature?", and "How is collocation classified by different researchers?"

II.1 Corpus linguistics

Nowadays, a lot of investigation has been devoted to how computers can facilitate language learning With the help of computer technology, the contextual factors that influence variability in language use can be discovered through examples taken from corpora A corpus can be described as a large collection of authentic texts that have been gathered in electronic form according to a specific set of criteria (Bowker& Pearson, 2002)

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

Conducting a corpus analysis is the very fundamental technique used by CL Corpus analysis

is a means of accessing a corpus of text to show how any given word or phrase in the text is

used in the immediate contexts in which it appears By grouping the uses of a particular word

or phrase on the computer screen or in printed form, the researcher shows the patterns in which the given word or phrase is typically used A large collection of a word‘s patterns then can be created very quickly and effectively Thus, CL has been widely employed in other areas of linguistics and lexicography, where corpora can be used to help dictionary markers to spot new words and identify contexts for new meanings (Meyer, 2002)

In addition to its crucial function in language study in general, the role of CL in language pedagogy has become increasingly prominent McEnery and Wilson (1996) argue that foreign language teachers usually produce simplified examples, which will raise difficulties for students when these are confronted with real, more complex language that sometimes they are incapable of processing CL can thus contribute to rendering learning a foreign language more effective since students will be faced with real language Authentic materials can motivate learners in the language classroom whereas non-authentic materials may not because they do not reflect real applications of language and thus students will lose motivation in learning in a target language

The essence of exposure to authentic materials even becomes more accurate in the case of ESP classes where all lessons are highly purpose-driven CL, therefore, takes an essential part in ESP, bringing a great deal of benefit to the teaching and learning on ESP courses However, among the many different types of corpora available such as written and spoken corpora, general reference corpora, special purpose corpora, monolingual and multilingual corpora, synchronic and diachronic corpora, open and closed corpora, and learner corpora (Biber, 1998), specialized corpora are preferable in ESP classes since they offer access to specialized vocabulary in specialized contexts In a specialized corpus, context has considerable influence

on the language choice; and the choice of language in turn plays an essential role in the shaping of the text genre

II.2 Sense and sense relations

In Nguyen Hoa‘s words (Nguyen Hoa, 2004:56), "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

Nguyen Hoa(2004:121) points out that sense relations may be of two types: subsitutional and combinatorial which roughly correspond to the two Saussurean terms paradigmatic and syntagmatic Subsitutional or paradigmatic relations are those which hold between

intersubstitutable members of the same grammatical category; combinational or syntagmatic relations hold normally hold between expressions of different grammatical categories which can be put together in grammatically well-formed combinations For example, a subsitutional

relation hold between the noun bachelor and spinster, whereas the relation that holds between the adjective unmarried and the nouns man and woman is combinatorial

In discussion of combinatorial relations, there emerges a question whether any adjective can combine with any noun or any verb can go with any noun Actually, English, as well as every other language, the combinations of words of different grammatical categories are restricted

Each word tends to co-occur with a certain range of words, which is referred to as collocation relation In fact, lexemes are so highly restricted with respect to collocation acceptability that

it is almost impossible to predict their combinational relations on the basis of an independent characterization of their sense

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 Flood…poured in, oozes, and stern in the

following sentences are all examples of metaphors

 A flood of protects poured in following the announcement

(a large quantity of…came in)

 He oozes geniality (displays all over)

 The government still hopes to stern the tide of inflation

(resist the force of)

However, if the fact of resemblance is explicitly signaled, by a word such as like, as in protest

came in like a flood, this is considered not to be metaphor but simile

According to Nguyen Hoa (2004:109), metaphors may be of three types

Living metaphors are those involving words used in unusual meaning and metaphors may be felt

as such (Beauty is a flower which wrinkles will devour.)

Faded metaphors lost their freshness because of long use and became habitual (dying capitalism,

to fall in love, golden youth)

Dead metaphors are words which have lost their direct meanings and are used only figuratively

(to ponder, capital, sarcasm)

Additionally, metaphors may be divided into different subgroups Following are some commonly and widely used subgroups of metaphors in English

 A subgroup of metaphors comprises names of human body transferred to other objects

Typical examples include the nose of a plane, the head of the school, or the leg of the table

 A subgroup of metaphors comprises names of animals transferred to the human beings For example, a cunning person is a fox; or a hard working person is a bee

 A subgroup of metaphors comprises proper names transferred to common ones For instance, a jealous person is called an Othello; and an eloquent speaker is a Cicero

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 Examples of metonymy

include eye, shirt, and breathe in the following sentences

 Keep your eye on the ball (gaze)

 He is always chasing shirts (girls)

 It will not happen while I still breathe (live)

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

Some common substitutions in metonymy include:

 place-for-institution (The White House objected to the plan.)

 thing-for-perception (There goes my knee.)

 object-for-possessor (The crown was angry with the Prime Minister's proposal.)

 part-for-whole (We do not like long hairs.)

 place-for-event (Watergate strikes at the heart of the American political system.)

In tradition, according to Nguyen Hoa (2004:113), the following cases of metonymy are often presented

The name of container is used instead of the thing contained (to drink a glass)

Names of parts of human body may be used as symbols (to have a good eye, kind heart)

The concrete is used instead of abstract (from the cradle to the grave)

The materials are used for the things made of the materials (Canvas, glass)

The name of the author is used for his works (Watts, Picasso)

Part is used for the whole and vice versa (We all live under the same roof; She is wearing a

fox)

A subtype of metonymy is called synecdoche in which a whole is represented by naming one

of its parts, or vice versa Roof, strings, and bite in the following sentences are examples of

synecdoche

 They all live under the same roof.(in one house)

 At this point the strings take over (stringed instruments)

 Let's go and have a bite.(have a meal)

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

Hyperbole is an exaggerated statement not meant to be understood literally However, the

effect is powerful

For example:

 It is a nightmare

 A thousand thanks

Litotes is really an understatement It is traditionally defined as expressing something in the

affirmative by the negative of its contrary For instance, not bad is often used to mean good; or rather unwise to mean very silly

Irony is used to express meaning by words of the opposite sense In irony, intonation plays an

essential role For example, nice in "You have got us into a nice mess." means bad

Euphemisms involve the use of a milder expression for something unpleasant For instance,

restroom or bathroom are used instead of WC

II.4 Collocation

II.4.1 Definition of collocation

It is not easy to define what collocation is In the linguistic literature, it is often discussed in

contrast with free word combination at one extreme and idiomatic expression at the other;

collocation occurs somewhere in the middle of this spectrum A free word combination can be described using general rules; that is, in terms of semantic constraints on the words which appear in a certain syntactic relation with a given headword An idiom, on the other hand, is a rigid word combination to which no generalities apply; neither can its meaning be determined from the meaning of its parts nor can it participate in the usual word-order variations Collocation falls between these extremes and it can be difficult to draw the line between categories A word combination fails to be classified as free and is termed as collocation when

the number of words which occur in a syntactic relation with a given headword decreases to the point where it is not possible to describe the set using semantic regularities

Thus, example of free word combinations include put + (object) or run + (object) (i.e manage) where the words that can occur as object are virtually open-ended In the case of put,

the semantic constraint on the object is relatively open-ended (any physical object can be mentioned) and thus the range of words that can occur is relatively unrestricted In the case of

run (in sense of manage or direct) the semantic restrictions on the object are tighter but still

follow a semantic generality: any institution or organization can be managed such as

businesses, ice cream parlor In contrast to these free word combinations, a phrase such as explore a myth is a collocation In its figurative sense, explore illustrates a much more restricted collocation range Possible objects are limited to words such as brief, idea, theory

At the other extreme, phrase such as fill the bill or fit the bill function as idioms, where no

words can be interchanged and variation in usage is not generally allowed

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 It is defined in

Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary that collocation is "a combination of words in a

language that happens very often and more frequently than would happen by chance" 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

In conclusion, definitions of collocation vary across research projects by different linguists The fact that collocation is observable in large samples of language has led to the important role collocation plays Actually, collocation is used in various applications and the information about collocation is significant to many linguistic areas such as dictionary writing, natural language processing, and language teaching "In all kinds of texts collocations are essential, indispensable elements…with which our utterances are very largely made" (Kjellmer, 1987:140); "Even very advanced learners often make inappropriate or unacceptable collocations" (McCarthy,1990:13) The above quotes make two points relevant to the English learners in the learning of collocation Firstly, collocation relations are an important part of the language to be mastered Secondly, it is an area which "resists" tuition and, therefore, requires special and systematic attention

II.4.2 Properties of collocation

In discussion of the nature of collocation, linguists have been trying to generalize what characteristics collocation has in common Generally, collocation has three major features as follow

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

According to Gains and Redman (1986:37), a statement on collocation is never absolute Items, as they said, may co-occur simply because the combination reflects a common real

world state of affairs For instance, pass and salt collocate since people want other people to

pass them the salt The notion of arbitrariness captures the fact that substituting a synonym for one of the words in a collocation word pair may result in an infelicitous lexical combination

For example, a phrase such as make an effort is acceptable, but make an exertion is not Similarly, a running commentary, commit treason, warm greetings are all true collocations, but a running discussion, commit treachery, and hot greetings are not acceptable lexical

combinations

However, Gains and Redman (1986:37) added, there may exist an element of linguistic convention in collocation Thus, English speakers have chosen to say, for example, that lions

roar rather than bellow It is because of the linguistic conventions collocation bears that

joining together semantically compatible parts does not always produce an acceptable

collocation For instance, quiet and noise appear perfectly acceptable to co-occur; however, in reality native speakers do not say quiet noise

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 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

The characteristics above lead to the fact that what is perfectly acceptable collocation in one

language may be unacceptable in another Take the case of eat in English and ăn (eat) in

Vietnamese as a typical example Although these two words are equivalent to each other, they

cannot go with the same range of nouns While such collocations as ăn hối lộ, ăn bữa tối,

không ăn lương, ăn Tết are acceptable in Vietnamese, the verb eat in English actually cannot

co-occur with these corresponding nouns Instead, the equivalent phrases must be take bribes, have dinner, without pay, enjoy Tet in which different verbs are employed

As collocation differs from language to language, students are put to a lot of troubles in learning collocation of a foreign language Unconsciously, students fall into the habit of translating a word combination from their first language to the foreign language and

eventually get an unacceptable collocation For example, instead of saying ride bicycle,

Vietnamese learners sometimes says go bicycle because đi xe đạp (go bicycle) is totally

correct in Vietnamese

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

In an effort to characterize collocation, linguists present a wide variety of individual collocations, attempting to categorize them as part of a general scheme Eventually, linguists end up in different classifications of collocation corresponding to their view 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

1 adjective + noun: heavy traffic

2 quantifier + noun: a hand/bunch of bananas

3 verb + noun: make/ deliver/ give speech

4 noun + verb: proportion grows/ increases/ rises

5 noun + noun: project management

6 preposition + noun: along/across the road

7 noun + preposition: the light from the window

8 adverb + verb: strongly recommend

9 verb + verb: be willing to risk

10 verb + preposition: depend on

11 verb + adjective: make/ keep/ declare something safe

12 adverb + adjective: downright/ completely/ absolutely ridiculous

13 adjective + preposition: pleased with

Secondly, according to the strength of collocation, collocations are categorized into four types:

1 Unique collocations are the most restricted ones in which the patterns have almost no

expected variations Usually, a unique collocation often forms a particular meaning rather than

a structure For example, the phrase kick the bucket is considered a unique collocation,

meaning "to die" used for bad men like thieves or murders While other nouns and verbs can

be substituted in the phrase to form other meaning phrases such as kick the door, and lift the bucket, the word combinations in these other phrases are no longer cohesive patterns in the way that kick the bucket is

2 Strong collocations are those in which any knowledge of a pattern can be incomplete

without some idea of its strong collocate Trenchant criticism and rancid butter are two

examples of collocations of this type

3 Medium-strength collocations form the great part of what we say and write This is

considered the most common and typical type of collocations Instances of medium-strength

collocations include hold a conversation, highly complicated, or direct equivalent

4 Weak collocations are often common patterns that help structure a sentence but do not

carry much specific meaning by themselves For instance, a weak collocation might be let's + verb, which is used for suggestion This is a commonly used structural pattern into which a

variety of verbs can be inserted without any changes in meaning of the phrase as a whole

CHAPTER III

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The study is a corpus-based analysis of the data in business articles It attempted to investigate high-frequency words together with their collocations in a comparative number of different business articles and reports The following chapter, as denoted by its name, will outline the methodology of the research It starts with the fundamental data collecting instruments employed in the study Procedures for data collection are addressed next, followed by procedures for data analysis

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

With continuous publication since its foundation in 1851, The New York Times is the third largest newspaper overall in America, behind The Wall Street Journal and USA Today Its

websites is the most popular American online newspapers website, receiving more than 30 million visitors every month

Washington Post

Along with The New York Times, The Washington Post is generally considered one of the

leading daily American newspapers While it has distinguished itself through its particular emphasis on the operation of the US government, economic issues have increasingly become a central topic of discussion in the newspaper

business website worldwide with millions of unique visitors per month

Bloomberg.com

This is the official website of Bloomberg L.P, an American multinational mass media corporation situated in New York City, New York Bloomberg has established a privileged

position in the world of economics and finance, making up one third of the global financial

market data with estimated revenue of $6.25 billion in 2009

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

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

Bloomberg Simon Johnson (23 Jan 2011) Europe’s Debt Crisis is

Still Likely to End Badly

Larry Elliot, Heather Stewards and John Hooper (9 Nov

2011) European Debt Crisis Spiraling Out of Control

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

The following illustrates a sample page for the main screen of the Concordance Program 3.3

Figure 1: Concordance Program’s main screen

III.2 Data collecting procedures

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

III.3 Data analyzing procedures

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 can differentiate 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

Considering the illustration of data from the Concordance program in the analysis of the selected keywords, due to the pre-set function of the Concordance 3.3, only a limited number

of cases of a particular word can be shown up As a result, for each keyword, a screen shot of the concordance is provided first to ensure the reliability of the research; then, the results will

be provided in tables with the author certain aims

CHAPTER IV

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

This chapter presents the results of the research, followed by an in-depth discussion on the possible findings The quantitative results of the analysis are presented to address the first research question Keywords with high frequency of occurrence in the constructed corpus are demonstrated in tables After that, on closer examination, a number of key collocations of the keywords are identified regarding their striking patterns

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?

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

It can be obviously seen from the table that, as in most English written texts, the most frequent

items in the corpus of the research are functional (or grammatical) words such as the, to, of, and, a, that, for From the 8th item in the word list, the key (or content) words that distinguish

the business genre of the corpus start to appear Among these are debt, European, Greece, crisis, Euro, countries, financial, bailout and so on Table 3 below shows the first 25 key

words from the high-frequency word list of the corpus

Table 3: First 25keywords from the corpus

As mentioned previously, within this research, only high-frequency keywords that differentiate the genre of the corpus, that is, written texts about an economic and financial issue, and possess striking patterns of collocates are brought into sharp focus for collocation analysis The following section, therefore, provides collocation information of four content

words, including debt, crisis, economic and markets

IV.2 Collocation analysis of content keywords

Research question 2: What are significant patterns of collocations of the content keywords

from the corpus?

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 selected articles with the relative frequency of 179 (0.852%) and 96 (0.457) respectively The following screen shots (Figure 2 and Figure 3) illustrate string matching of CRISIS and DEBT in the corpus respectively

Figure 2: String matching of CRISIS from the corpus

Figure 3: String matching of DEBT from the corpus

Both of the two words take a wide range of collocates within the corpus They are selected for analysis at the same time and in the same section as they themselves frequently occur together throughout the articles and their collocates share a good number of common features The section below looks at collocation pattern of DEBT and CRISIS, identifying adjectives, verbs, nouns as well as phrases these words can go with

At the first glance, it is noteworthy that almost all of the adjectives shown in Figure 2 above are used attributively within the corpus, coming before the noun CRISIS they modify (only

continuing, looming, imminent, unshakable are excluded) Semantically, these are general

adjectives susceptible to objective measure since they are used to describe the existence and

development of the debt crisis This should be a signal feature of the corpus 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: CRISIS Concordance (Adjective collocations)

economic crisis However, panic due to the Greek

debt crisis hit the country in the late

2009 and early

47

if the Eurozone enters a full-on crisis For example, European debt makes

up almost half of all

98

with a slow-moving but unshakable crisis that has underscored the flaws behind

the common

340

greater penalties for bid deficits But

what appeared to be an imminent crisis

Another potential crisis bubbled up in September, as

European officials angrily warned Greece that

477

To address the growing debt crisis , Chancellor Angela Merkel of

Germany and President Nicolas

503

assistance as part of the continuing debt crisis The aid offered by countries that

use the euro was

700

already reluctant European leaders and

the European Central Bank to present a

full-blown crisis

881

―unite or face irrelevance‖ in the face of

the mounting economic crisis

in Italy ―We are witnessing 1040

underlying economic crisis He pointed out that they would

require referendums in at least four

That helped ease fears of an immediate

debt

crisis

riskier investments as collateral for loans

to help them through the financial crisis

1506

All the adjectives going with CRISIS in the corpus are listed in Table 5 below

Table 5: Adjectives collocating with CRISIS

Adjectives in the combinations with DEBT as shown in Table 6, on the other hand, are

remarkable for the predominance of words indicating the ‗debt owner‘ such as European, Greek, Italian, Irish, or nation’s and country’s – nouns in the possessive case functioning as

adjectives This tells readers about countries that suffered the most in the stories told

Table 6: DEBT concordance (Adjective collocations)

and ever-increasing debt due to a lower cost of borrowing

Greece hired Wall Street firms, most

8

deficits were more than double previous

estimates Greek debt

was immediately downgraded The 11

more austerity, and Moody‘s has put

Spanish debt

on warning for another downgrade 67

growth, fears that Italy would develop an

Italian debt

in May In June, Moody‘s also threatened a downgrade, citing

71

rising borrowing costs

if the euro zone enters a full-on crisis For

example, European debt

makes up almost half of all 98

Greece‘s rising debt troubled the markets from whom it

borrowed Raising more money became

138

create this frenzied fight to save the euro

But while Italy, Portugal and Ireland all

face similar debt

164

as the US and its Federal Reserve, can

buy back bad debt

from banks if such a crisis approaches

181

against potential losses on distressed

sovereign

2012, the troika engineered a default by

Greece on most of its private debt

of gross domestic product and total debt to 60 percent Violators would be

hit with sanctions unless

556

expected to begin releasing to Greece the

aid it needs to prevent a default when its

levels to 120% by 2020 Greece needs to

have this level reduced to 60% for a true

sustainable debt

1205

Lisbon struggled on Friday to quell fears

of a looming debt

Senior officials at the major rating

agencies on Friday played down the risk

of an immediate debt

1459

Table 7 below summarizes the adjectival collocates of DEBT in the corpus

Table 7: Adjectives collocating with DEBT

Both of the two groups of adjectival collocations are also distinct for a significant number of – ing adjectives coming from the same families with verbs describing trends to indicate the

current status of the debt crisis at the time it was written about Some of other examples are

continuing, looming, rising, growing, ongoing and so on

While most of the adjectives in Table 5and Table 7are widely used, some of the words should

be focused for attention as when in collocation with CRISIS and DEBT, they may convey

such meaning that causes confusion among learners Immediate is very familiar for its most common meaning ‗happening or done without delay‘ However, in immediate crisis or immediate debt, the adjective makes the sense of ‗existing now and needing urgent attention‘ (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 2011) The word then becomes roughly synonymous with existing, pressing, critical or urgent and can be in happy combinations with such words

as concern, problem and danger With unshakable crisis, there is an indication of a metaphor

of ECONOMY AS A PERSON Originally used to describe a person‘s feeling or attitude that

cannot be changed or destroyed, in collocation with CRISIS, unshakable is employed to denote the firmness of a business matter In bad debt, the overall meaning of the combination does nothing with the expected senses the word debt as offered in many dictionaries Instead, bad debt becomes a fixed technical term in accounting referring to a debt that will not be paid

Table 8: CRISIS Concordance (Noun collocations)

Unlike Greece, Ireland had a balanced budget

before the

crisis hit However, it also had a huge real 33

In November 2010, Ireland, wracked by a

banking crisis

that followed the collapse of a housing

352

But the crisis response in the United States did

not depend solely on backed entities

government-662

The goal is to help present a future crisis by ensuring that governments do not

spend beyond their

creating a potential funding crisis It didn‘t help when the EBA

(European Banking Authority) did

1216

around E1.8 trillion As we learned from the

2008US crisis

, there are numerous structures that 1246

But after being in crisis mode for nearly two years, some

investors are sounding more optimistic

1320

The nearly three-year-old crisis appears to be entering a new phase

as the respite in global financial