| Abstract: |
Corpus lexicographers working in the tradition of John Sinclair (of whom the present author is one) argue that electronic dictionaries of the future will have a duty to pay close attention to phraseology and to phraseological meaning in text. To do this, they will need to make a distinction between normal patterns of use of words and exploitations of normal uses, such as freshly coined metaphors, used for rhetorical and other effects. Electronic dictionaries will report the norms of phraseology associated with phraseological patterns instead of or as well as word meaning in isolation. The foundations for this approach to lexical analysis are explored in the Theory of Norms and Exploitations (Hanks, in press). The present paper starts by discussing the relationship between valency and collocation and goes on to discuss a particular problem in collocational and valency analysis, namely the effect on clause meaning of omitted arguments. For example, the verb 'fire', with a human subject, has two main meanings: "to discharge a projectile from a firearm" and "to dismiss a person from employment". However, if the direct object is omitted, only the first sense of the verb can be activated, not the second. The paper investigates some corpus-based examples of elliptical arguments and discusses their semantic implications. |