A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically, which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data.
Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus, its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference. The large collections of text allow linguistics to run quantitative analyses on linguistic concepts, otherwise harder to quantify.
A monolingual learner's dictionary (MLD) is designed to meet the reference needs of people learning a foreign language. MLDs are based on the premise that language-learners should progress from a bilingual dictionary to a monolingual one as they become more proficient in their target language, but that general-purpose dictionaries are inappropriate for their needs. Dictionaries for learners include information on grammar, usage, common errors, collocation, and pragmatics, which is largely missing from standard dictionaries, because native speakers tend to know these aspects of language intuitively. And while the definitions in standard dictionaries are often written in difficult language, those in an MLD use a simple and accessible defining vocabulary.
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated.
The Bank of English (BoE) is a representative subset of the 4.5 billion words COBUILD corpus, a collection of English texts. These are mainly British in origin, but content from North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other Commonwealth countries is also being included.
Rodney D. Huddleston is a British linguist and grammarian specializing in the study and description of English.
The word(s) of the year, sometimes capitalized as "Word(s) of the Year" and abbreviated "WOTY", refers to any of various assessments as to the most important word(s) or expression(s) in the public sphere during a specific year.
An adverbial clause is a dependent clause that functions as an adverb. That is, the entire clause modifies a separate element within a sentence. As with all clauses, it contains a subject and predicate, though the subject as well as the (predicate) verb are omitted and implied if the clause is reduced to an adverbial phrase as discussed below.
John McHardy Sinclair was a Professor of Modern English Language at Birmingham University from 1965 to 2000. He pioneered work in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, lexicography, and language teaching.
Studies that estimate and rank the most common words in English examine texts written in English. Perhaps the most comprehensive such analysis is one that was conducted against the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), a massive text corpus that is written in the English language.
The advanced learner's dictionary is the most common type of monolingual learner's dictionary, that is, a dictionary written in one language only, for someone who is learning a foreign language. It differs from a bilingual or translation dictionary, a standard dictionary written for native speakers, or a children's dictionary. Its definitions are usually built on a restricted defining vocabulary. "Advanced" usually refers learners with a proficiency level of B2 or above according to the Common European Framework. Basic learner's dictionaries also exist.
Patrick Hanks is an English lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastician. He has edited dictionaries of general language, as well as dictionaries of personal names.
Data-driven learning (DDL) is an approach to foreign language learning. Whereas most language learning is guided by teachers and textbooks, data-driven learning treats language as data and students as researchers undertaking guided discovery tasks. Underpinning this pedagogical approach is the data - information - knowledge paradigm. It is informed by a pattern-based approach to grammar and vocabulary, and a lexicogrammatical approach to language in general. Thus the basic task in DDL is to identify patterns at all levels of language. From their findings, foreign language students can see how an aspect of language is typically used, which in turn informs how they can use it in their own speaking and writing. Learning how to frame language questions and use the resources to obtain data and interpret it is fundamental to learner autonomy. When students arrive at their own conclusions through such procedures, they use their higher order thinking skills and are creating knowledge.
The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) is a dictionary of the Old English language, published by the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, under the direction of Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette diPaolo Healey, and Haruko Momma. It complements the Oxford English Dictionary's comprehensive survey of modern English, the Middle English Dictionary's comprehensive survey of Middle English, and the Scottish Language Dictionaries surveys of Scots.
The Collins English Dictionary is a printed and online dictionary of English. It is published by HarperCollins in Glasgow.
The lexical approach is a method of teaching foreign languages described by Michael Lewis in the early 1990s. The basic concept on which this approach rests is the idea that an important part of learning a language consists of being able to understand and produce lexical phrases as chunks. Students are taught to be able to perceive patterns of language (grammar) as well as have meaningful set uses of words at their disposal when they are taught in this way. In 2000, Norbert Schmitt, an American linguist and a Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, contributed to a learning theory supporting the lexical approach he stated that "the mind stores and processes these [lexical] chunks as individual wholes." The short-term capacity of the brain is much more limited than long-term and so it is much more efficient for our brain to pull up a lexical chunk as if it were one piece of information as opposed to pulling up each word as separate pieces of information.
Michael Hoey was a British linguist and Baines Professor of English Language. He lectured in applied linguistics in over 40 countries.
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, and Manning as part of the COBUILD project. It is a highly informal account that suggests a linear view of grammar.
The Collins COBUILD Advanced Dictionary (CCAD) from HarperCollins, first published in 1987, is a dictionary that distinguished itself by providing definitions in full sentences, rather than excerpted phrases. Example sentences are given for almost every meaning of every word, drawn from a large corpus of actual usage.
Susan Elizabeth Hunston is a British linguist. She received her PhD in English under the supervision of Michael Hoey at the University of Birmingham in 1989. She does research in the areas of corpus linguistics and applied linguistics. She is one of the primary developers of the Pattern Grammar model of linguistic analysis, which is a way of describing the syntactic environments of individual words, based on studying their occurrences in large sets of authentic examples, i.e. language corpora. The Pattern Grammar model was developed as part of the COBUILD project, where Hunston worked for several years as a senior grammarian for the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary.
