The IdiomSearch Project and its theoretical underpinnings

Colson, Jean-Pierre [UCL]

We refer here to phraseology as the study of set phrases in the broadest sense, including partly fixed phrases (routines and formulae, collocations), and also very fixed phrases (idioms and proverbs). This actually comes very close to formulaic language (Wray 2002; 2008) The notion of phraseology is now used across a wide range of linguistic disciplines: Phraseology (proper), Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Cognitive Linguistics, Computational Linguistics… Corpus-based computational phraseology has recourse to huge corpora, as it has been demonstrated that, while set phrases as a whole represent a high percentage of word combinations in any text (Sinclair 1991), the frequency of a given set phrase in a corpus is usually low (Colson 2007, Moon 1998). Computational phraseology largely relies on the statistics of word co-occurrence (Evert 2004), but also explores other techniques derived from information retrieval, such as clustering (Baeza-Yates & Ribeiro-Neto 1999).