Pattern grammar

Pattern Grammar is a model for describing the syntactic environments of individual lexical items, derived from studying their occurrences in authentic linguistic corpora. It was developed by Hunston, Francis, nning as part of the COBUILD project.

Each word has a set of patterns assigned to it which describe typical contexts in which they are used. Often these are separate for different word senses.

Pattern Notation

Patterns are given as sequence of lower-case grammatical elements, with the central element of the pattern in upper case. The elements are either labels for grammatical categories ('v' for verb, 'n' for noun group, 'prep' for preposition) or actual lexical items (for example specific prepositions).

Examples: SKIM

The word skim includes the following patterns in the COBUILD dictionary:

V n off/from n

Skim is a verb, and as the pattern describes its behaviour it is in upper case. The verb is then followed by a noun group, a preposition (either off or from) and a second noun group. This pattern applies for example to "She skimmed the cream off the milk". The choice of preposition is limited to those two options, which is why they are specified directly instead of using the broader category 'prep'.

V n

This pattern describes the use of skim in "...re-surface all the walls by skimming the surface smooth ready for painting..."

V over/across n

"I was wondering if someone who speaks French could skim over it for me and correct it."

V through n

"Have a skim through our step-by-step guide and find out why"

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/3/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.