An investigation of the usage and collocability of English verbs of thinking based on the online edition of 'The New York Times'.

摘要

The term collocation refers to the habitual co-occurrence of individual lexical items. Learners of foreign languages often encounter problems concerning collocations because these coherent lexical units cannot be simply translated from one language to another. In this context, text corpora offer invaluable help to foreign language users. This thesis therefore demonstrates how a newspaper corpus can be utilized for collocation retrieval.; The online edition of The New York Times was analyzed during a period of two weeks time in order to answer four research questions regarding the usage and collocability of six English verbs of thinking (to consider, to meditate, to muse, to ponder, to reflect, to think). The results show in which contexts these semantically closely connected verbs are used and what their collocators are.