This study aims to clarify the relationship between the use of suffixes in English textbooks and suffixes used by high school students through making a comprehensive comparison of suffix usage in both contexts. The analysis is based on corpora consisting of English sentences written by Japanese high school students and sentences from authorized English textbooks. The results of the corpus analysis show a similar trend in the frequency of suffixes in textbooks and in students’ production of suffixes.

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This study examines the formulaicity of English formulaic sequences in the listening and reading sections of Japan’s Common Test for University Admissions. Analyzing the Common Test corpus, continuous lexical bundles and discontinuous p-frames were extracted and evaluated using various indices. The findings indicate that the reading section predominantly features bundles akin to those found in written language, whereas the listening section exhibits patterns more typical of spoken language. Additionally, the study reveals that p-frames in the reading section exhibit significantly greater variability than those in the listening section. This suggests a more nuanced and balanced phrase usage in the reading section. The results offer valuable insights that could influence the development and evaluation methods of large-scale language tests.

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This study investigates the semantic motivations for the choice of noun as object of the inchoative verb start. Start is known to take idiosyncratic noun collocates, such as engine and fire, among others, and many researchers have investigated what makes it possible for start to take certain nouns with no internal temporal structure as its complement. This study conducts corpus-based research to examine the nouns that occur as the complement of start with high frequency and observes the semantic characters of these nouns using searches in the British National Corpus (BNC). Qualitative analysis of the characteristics of nouns as objects of start show that start prefers to take highly individuated nouns such as engine, family, and job; it was concluded that this semantic preference is generated from the highly transitive nature of start.

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This study examines the semantic prosody of the verb “cause” through a comprehensive corpus-based sentiment analysis, challenging the traditional association with negative sentiment. By integrating co-varying collexeme analysis with sentiment analysis, we demonstrate a significant prevalence of neutrality in the sentiment scores for constructions involving the verb “cause”. Our findings question the assumed negative semantic prosody of “cause”, revealing a nuanced sentiment landscape where neutral expressions predominate. This research contributes to linguistic, philosophical, and data science fields by offering new insights into the complex interplay between language, cognition, and emotion, and suggests avenues for future research into the emotional valence of linguistic expressions.

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This paper proposes a method to conflate directional association measures. In measuring associations of collocates, various measures are proposed (e.g., Dice, Jaccard, Mutual Information (MI)). These conventional association measures are said only to reflect limited aspects of collocates. One of the most frequently discussed aspects in collocational analysis is the direction of associations. For instance, when analysts wish to state that the possessive article “my” is likely to occur with the noun “sister”, they need to recognise the two questions regarding the two different directions of association: (i) ‘When the word “my” is used, how likely does the word “sister” collocate?’, and (ii) ‘When the word “sister” is used, how likely does the word “my” collocate?’. Collostructional analysis implements these directions as two types of ΔPs, treated as independent aspects of the association (cf. Gries 2019, 2023). This paper proposes a method to integrate these dimensions. Our approach can account for (i) the sparse distributions of two ΔPs and (ii) the positive correlations between constructions and words more smoothly.

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