Mastering idiomatic language in its broadest sense is necessary to achieve advanced levels in language learning. Therefore, phraseological information should be easily accessible. To this end, the project Woordcombinaties (Word Combinations) is developing an integrated lexicographical resource combining a collocation and idiom dictionary with a pattern dictionary. It merges a word-in-context and collocation tool, following the example of SKELL (Sketch Engine for language learning), and a pattern dictionary, following examples such as the Pattern dictionary of English Verbs (PDEV), T-PAS for Italian (Ježek et al. 2014) and Verbario (Renau and Nazar 2016).
Woordcombinaties is based on a subcorpus of the Corpus of Contemporary Dutch (CHN), which contains about 200 million tokens of primarily newspaper material from both the Netherlands and Belgium, reflecting language variety in Dutch. The corpus is syntactically parsed with the Alpino parser (van Noord 2006) and uploaded into Sketch Engine. Pattern editing is based on Hanks’ theory of Norms and Exploitations (2013) and uses the lexicographic technique of Corpus Patterns Analysis to sort and classify language data.
The database of combinations and patterns is made available through the application Woordcombinaties.
Further information and links:
- More information about the word combinations workflow (in Dutch)
- About Woordcombinaties
- Colman, L. & Tiberius, C. (2018). A Good Match: a Dutch Collocation, Idiom and Pattern Dictionary Combined. In J. Čibej, V. Gorjanc, I. Kosem & S. Krek (Eds.), Proceedings of the XVIII EURALEX International Congress: Lexicography in Global Contexts (pp. 233-246). Ljubljana, Slovenia. https://euralex.org/publications/a-good-match-a-dutch-collocation-idiom-and-pattern-dictionary-combined/
- Colman, L. & Tiberius, C. (2023). Meerwoordexpressies in Woordcombinaties: de gordiaanse knoop. In: Sterkenburg, P. van, Bonth, R. de & Heylen K. (Eds.), In termen van taal. Liber amicorum Frieda Steurs. Scriptum. 69-81.
- Tiberius C.P.A. (26 February 2024). Computerlinguïstiek en fraseologie. Leiden. [inaugural address]. https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/3717728