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AUTHOR "Myriam Bouveret"

TITLE "Review of Phraseology. Theory, Analysis, and Applications by Cowie, A. P. (ed.)"

SUBJECT "Terminology 8:1 (2002)"

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170 Book Reviews

Klavans, Judith and Philip Resnik. 1996. (eds.) The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and
Statistical Approaches to Language, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Maynard, Diana and Sophia Ananiadou. 2001. (chap 13) Term extraction using a similarity-
based approach.
Meyer, Ingrid. 2001. (chap 14) Extracting knowledge-rich contexts for terminography. A
conceptual and methodological framework.
Nakagawa, Hiroshi. 2001. (chap 15) Experimental evaluation of ranking and selection
methods in term extraction.
Nazarenko, P. Zweigenbaum, B. Habert and J. Bouaud. 2001. (chap 16) Corpus-based
extension of a terminological semantic-lexicon.
Oakes, Michael P. and Chris. D. Paice. 2001. (chap 17) Term extraction for automatic
abstracting.

Reviewers address
Philippe Langlais
Dpartement dinformatique et recherche oprationnelle
Universit de Montral
C. P. 6128, succ. Centre-ville
Montral (Qubec)
H3C 3J7
langlais@iro.umontreal.ca

Cowie, A. P. (ed.). 2001. Phraseology. Theory, Analysis, and Applica-

tions, Oxford University Press, Linguistics, 258 p.
Reviewed by Myriam Bouveret

This book about Phraseology edited by A. P. Cowie was rst published by

Oxford University Press in 1998 and was recently edited in paperback. Phraseol-
ogy has been a matter of growing interest in applied linguistics amongst
dierent elds like terminology, lexicography, and foreign language teaching.
Phraseology is the set of phraseological word-like units or sentence-like units of
a language, that is to say units that lack a certain freedom of combination and
can be formulae, idioms, xed or semi-xed collocations for example: thank
you, to spill the beans, make a U-turn, shopping center, pass an exam. This
phenomenon has actually been described in the literature since the 1930s with
the rst collocational dictionaries like the Palmer and Hornby studies for a
learners Dictionary of English.
Ten contributions are gathered into four parts. The rst one presents the
Russian Tradition, the second one shows Phraseology in Written and Spoken
 Book Reviews 171

Corpora, the third one presents studies in Special Purpose Language and
Foreign-Learner Language, and the last one deals with Phraseology and the
Dictionary. One of the dierences in the study of phraseology is the nature of
the data. Five of the papers examine existing data or data collected from large
corpora constructed by the authors (Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8). Thierry Fonte-
nelle for his part collects data from an existing dictionary (Chapter 9). In his
introduction, A. P. Cowie provides a historical and comparative survey which
greatly enlightens the reading. He is also the author of a synthesis comparing
Eastern and Western Europe lexicographic approaches to phraseology (Chap-
ter 10). Two papers do not present results from data but oer a conceptual
framework for analyzing phraseology. One is about phraseology as a cultural set
of a language (Chapter 3). In the other, one Igor Melcuk (Chapter 2) presents
Lexical Functions and their role in the Explanatory and Combinatorial Dictio-
nary. All contributions provide a dierent point of view of the subject but what
is striking in the overview is the very loose semantic continuum that emerges
from the concept of phraseology. At one end, a phraseological unit can be a
xed, a completely holistic expression, which requires a global interpretation.
At the other end, the unit can be partly compositional and sometimes accepts
synonyms for one of the units. It can also happen that in a given semantic eld,
the same unit can combine with dierent cooccurrents. This property could
then be exploited as a lexical inheritance principle in a dictionary (Chapter 2
and cf. Melcuk and Wanner 1996). Melcuk describes these global vs compo-
sitional properties very clearly by providing a model in which he studies
phrasemes and lexical functions. Full phrasemes and Quasi-phrasemes are the
more or less xed set phrases or words, and syntagmatic lexical functions
concern the restricted lexical cooccurrence. The following diagram shows the
dierent categories (Melcuk: 30):

Phrasemes

Pragmatic phrasemes Semantic phrasemes

1 Pragmatemes 2 Idioms 3 Collocations 4 Quasi-idioms

In his view, as long as they cannot be derived from grammar rules and are
not described in a grammar, phrasemes should be stocked in a lexicon in three
ways: as dictionary entries like any other full lexical unit, as idioms inside a

2002. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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172 Book Reviews

lexical entry, and as values of Lexical Function in a section of a dictionary entry.

Pragmatemes are other termed formulae by S. Granger (see Chapter 7) and they
are expressions like Thank you, How are you doing ?
To summarize the contributions, I will use Cowies guidelines provided in
his introduction. Three major approaches are represented:
The classical Russian theory is illustrated by I. Melcuk (Collocations and
Lexical Functions, Chapter 2). His concept of phraseme is dened within the
Meaning-Text theory. Phrasemes are divided into two kinds, pragmatic and
semantic, as shown in the previous diagram. The majority of collocations are
semi-phrasemes. To describe them, Melcuk proposes a set of about sixty
Lexical Functions dened as follows: A lexical function is a function that
associates with a specic lexical unit (L) which is the argument or keyword of
f, a set of synonymous lexical expressions, the value of f (Melcuk: 32). Syntag-
matic lexical functions are amongst others modiers, support verbs. In the
latter, the function Oper, for example, serves to link a deep syntactic actant of L
to L itself, at the deep syntactic level. Examples of paradigmatic lexical functions
are synonyms, semantic and syntactic derivatives.
An anthropological approach follows where phraseology is viewed from a
cultural point of view, especially from a metaphorical one (V. Teliya et al.,
Phraseology as a Language of Culture, Chapter 3). The authors hypothesis is that
there is a connection between the mental attitudes and the culture of a speakers
community. Phraseology, then, is a way to observe the anthropological para-
digm that underlies language, and could be a eld for comparative studies
between cultures. She proposes a conceptual frame work to study cultural
markers in phraseological expressions.
The third approach is corpus-based. The two authors (R. Moon, Frequencies
and Forms of Phrasal Lexemes in English, Chapter 4; B. Altenberg, On the
Phraseology of Spoken English: The Evidence of Recurrent Word-combinations,
Chapter 5) use mainly comparative statistical methods. R. Moon shows that
40% of the phrasemes in her corpus have a predicate nature. For each grammat-
ical category, she tries to nd traces of markedness. For example, the expression
over the moon is typically associated with an adjunct or a when-clause. Her
results prove that variation exists for 40% of the expressions which do not have
a xed canonical form in terms of lexico-grammatical criteria. B. Altenberg
examines 470 word-combinations found in the London-Lund corpus of Spoken
English and divides them into three types: full clauses, clauses constituents, and
incomplete phrases. The study shows that there is a conventionalized language
in spoken discourse. The use of routine and more or less prefabricated expres-

2002. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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 Book Reviews 173

sions is evident (Altenberg: 120).

Following those three main approaches represented in part one and two,
part three is dedicated to three papers, two of which are about Foreign-Learners
(S. Granger, Prefabricated Patterns in Advanced EFL Writing: Collocations and
Formulae, Chapter 7; P. Howarth, The Phraseology of Learners Academic
Writing, Chapter 8). These two contributions emphasize the crucial importance
of phraseology for foreign learners and the diculty of gaining this linguistic
competence, partly because of its pragmatic, cultural value and partly because
of its non-open form. They both suggest developing methods for foreign
language-teaching based on a model of phraseology in the native language as
well as a method of analyzing mistakes in non-native speakers productions.
Glser focuses on contrastive interlanguage analysis, while Howarth is mainly
concerned with post-graduate students from a variety of native languages.
Compared with the quality of the rest of the contributions, Chapter 8 is of less
interest for the analysis of the corpus and in its conclusions. The third paper in
this section (rst in linear order) is about The Stylistic Potential of Phraseological
Units in the Light of Genre analysis (Chapter 6). In this chapter, Rosemarie
Glser provides a very good synthesis of phraseology in her introduction. She
proposes the term phrasicon for whole inventory of idioms and phrases, both
word-like and sentence-like set expressions (Glser: 126). She studies mostly
what she considers to be the prototype of phraseological units, the idioms, that
is to say lexicalized, reproducible word groups in common use, which have
syntactic and semantic stability, and shows in dierent discourse genres how
the phrasicon is a relevant stylistic device.
Part 4 ends the book with two in-depth studies on phraseology in dictionar-
ies. The rst one is by T. Fontenelle (Discovering Signicant Lexical Functions in
Dictionary entries, Chapter 9) who shows how to retrieve phrasemes from a
bilingual French-English dictionary, the Collins-Robert, well known for its
collocational richness. He describes his semi-automatic retrieval method and
then his way of dierentiating the expressions by using an enriched model of
Melcuks Lexical Functions. The last chapter written by A. Cowie is a strongly
documented historical synthesis of phraseology in the British and Eastern
Europe traditions since the 1930s (Phraseological Dictionaries: some East-West
Comparisons, Chapter 10).
At present, to study the lexicon requires the use of computational models
and techniques, as has been pointed out here. Several questions arise when
considering phraseology in terms of Natural Language Processing applications.
What kind of material to use: a corpus compiled from existing dictionaries or

2002. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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</TARGET "bou">
"rev">

174 Book Reviews

a real one from other corpora? If using materials from dictionaries, then how
does one identify, retrieve and homogenize the information? In this way, the
work of Thierry Fontenelle reviewed here, is likely to contribute to French-
English research. If the material is to be gathered from other corpora, then how
does one retrieve it? Several tools for extracting word combinations from
corpora in terms of head and expansion allow studies about collocations vs
regular syntactic-semantic distributions. This data must be stored in a robust
and reusable way. New, highly compatible tools like XML present a very
interesting way of organizing lexical databases. In conclusion, we can say that
Phraseology is a remarkable book. It is a valuable synthesis of historical and
modern perspectives of a very rich eld of in the lexicon of a language. The only
regret might be that in the section termed Phraseology in special-Purpose
Languages and Foreign-Learner Language, there is no actual study of Terminolo-
gy. That is a pity because in that area, collocations, or specialized lexical
combinations (LHomme 2000) have a greater role than anywhere else, form
and meaning of lexical units being xed inside a domain.

References

LHomme, M. C. 2000. Understanding specialized lexical combinations, Terminology 6(1),

90109.
Melcuk, I. et al. 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000. Dictionnaire explicatif et combinatoire. Recherches
lexico-smantiques I, II, III, IV, Montral: Les Presses de lUniversit de Montral.
Melcuk, I. and L. Wanner. 1996. Lexical functions and Lexical Inheritance for Emotional
Lexemes in German, In Wanner (ed.), 207277.
Wanner, L. (ed.). 1996. Lexical functions in Lexicography and Natural Language Processing.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Reviewers address
Bouveret Myriam
LIUM
Universit du Maine
Avenue Olivier Messian
72085 Le Mans Cedex 09
France
Myriam.Bouveret@univ-lemans.fr

2002. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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