Abstract
This study aims to design corpus-informed teaching materials for advanced English students, reflecting differences in native as opposed to non-native phraseologies. We are building on previous studies suggesting that even advanced L2 learners tend to use a limited repertory of phraseological sequences in ways which differ considerably from native usage (e.g.
Granger 2017; or Hasselgård 2017, referring back to Hasselgren 1994, terms these 'phraseological teddy bears'). This presents a potential issue as limited phraseological choices hinders the students' language production in terms of accuracy.
We focus on phraseological patterning involving prepositions. As pointed out by Hunston (2008), focus on function words in corpus analyses can be beneficial as phraseological patterns containing e.g. prepositions are involved in text structuring and can help point out larger-scale patterning within discourse, highly relevant to advanced students.
We employ data from the BNC (100 mw) complementing these by a COCA sample (3.6 mw). First, a list of the 10 most frequent prepositions is compiled for each corpus.
For each, we extract 3-5-grams containing the preposition in any slot, using Engrammer (Milička 2019). Engrammer enables searches for sequences of different lengths at once, comparing collocation strength between grams using various collocation measures.
It reveals alternations in the selected slot, detecting variants where applicable. We retrieve a list of patterns for each preposition and examine it in context.
We adopt a constructional approach, identifying its textual functions and semantic features. This functional-semantic analysis results in the compilation of a list of prepositional constructions.
These are compared between British and American English to control for potential dialectological variance. Preliminary results suggest that some prepositional constructions have particular semantic prosodies.
E.g.as a result of correlates with negative consequences (collapse, shortage, breakdown), while in the face of presents the actor in a positive light