Collostructional analysis

Collostructional analysis so far comprises three different methods:

• collexeme analysis, to measure the degree of attraction/repulsion of a lemma to a slot in one particular construction;
• distinctive collexeme analysis, to measure the preference of a lemma to one particular construction over another, functionally similar construction; multiple distinctive collexeme analysis extends this approach to more than two alternative constructions;
• covarying collexeme analysis, to measure the degree of attraction of lemmas in one slot of a construction to lemmas in another slot of the same construction.

Collostructional analysis requires frequencies of words and constructions and is similar to a wide variety of collocation statistics. It differs from raw frequency counts by providing not only observed co-occurrence frequencies of words and constructions, but also

(i) a comparison of the observed frequency to the one expected by chance; thus, collostructional analysis can distinguish attraction and repulsion of words and constructions;

(ii) a measure of the strength of the attraction or repulsion; this is usually the log-transformed p-value of a Fisher-Yates exact test.

Collostructional analysis differs from most collocation statistics such that

(i) it measures not the association of words to words, but of words to syntactic patterns or constructions; thus, it takes syntactic structure more seriously than most collocation-based analyses;

(ii) it has so far only used the most precise statistics, namely the Fisher-Yates exact test based on the hypergeometric distribution; thus, unlike t-scores, z-scores, chi-square tests etc., the analysis is not based on, and does not violate, any distributional assumptions.

• Collocation extraction