Collocational Frameworks in Spanish

Abstract

Collocational frameworks are discontinuous combinations of grammatical items which enclose lexical words (e.g., a_of in English). In this paper, the concept of collocational framework is applied to the analysis of five corpora of Spanish which allow comparisons across a range of communication channel types. Twenty-eight frameworks, consisting of articles and/or prepositions, are investigated in terms of their quantitative importance in texts and their selectivity for the lexical words they enclose. Although measures of quantitative significance and selectivity show strong correlations across all types of text, these correlations are to some extent sensitive to the spoken/written dimension. The lexical collocates also show clear semantic groupings. Implications of the work for linguistic theory and description and for language teaching and learning are briefly discussed.