The four c’s: conceptualization, convention, culture and creativity in corpus data

Abstract

Collocational relationships between words and grammatical structures (whether in the form of grammar patterns or collostructions) have become an established dimension of semantic description over the past thirty years, but the precise nature of the dimensions of meaning reflected in such relationships remains to be determined. This paper suggests four factors that contribute to the co-occurrence of linguistic items and thus to collocation: (i) the conceptualization of the content that the speaker intends to express, (ii) the cultural context of an utterance, (iii) linguistic conventions, and (iv) linguistic creativity. A case study of the English ditransitive and the “dative” construction with to is presented to demonstrate the influence of these four factors. Key words: collocation, collostructional analysis, conceptualization, culture, convention, creativity.