COLLOCATION: A PRACTICAL STUDY ON WORDS ‘CANCER AND AIDS’
EŞDİZİMLİK: KANSER VE AİDS SÖZCÜKLERİ ÜZERİNDE BİR UYGULAMA ÇALIŞMASI

Author : Bilge ÖZTÜRK -- Özge CAN
Number of pages : 311-318

Abstract

Collocation represents the relationship between a word and its correlation with the preceeding and following sentences. Collocation defined as a textual phenomenon is treated as a product of lexical relations (Hoey, 1991). The studies on collocation point out the relationship between certain items and more than one word or group of words. It is aimed in this article to investigate the words that represent collocation with the words “cancer” and “AIDS” in news texts, and to determine the viewpoints on these subjects. This research consists of the corpus-based analysis carried out on 27 news texts (15 of which is on cancer, 12 of which is on AIDS). And these texts are analyzed by means of Concord-Wordsmith Programme and the collocational relations between five lexical items occuring before and after the words ‘cancer’ and ‘AIDS’ are drawn on Virtannen’s (2004) “Polls and surveys show” study. The research questions of the study are determined as (a) how often are the words cancer and aids used in the corpus? (b) with which key words are cancer and aids in collocational relation? Why? (c) how often do the words’ cancer and aids co occur? With reference to the findings, it can be indicated that there is a meaningful bonding between the patterns in the texts, and that the adjacency of lexical items is not incidental. The study in which we tried to determine the collocational patterns of the words cancer and aids, basically put forward that cancer is a curable disease and AIDS is a striving disease. It is assumed that a person even has no worldview about the words cancer and aids, just by taking the collocational patterns of those words into account, can have knowledge about the topic.

Keywords

(i) collocation (ii) text patterns (iii) lexical relations (iv) corpus-based approach (v) Concord-Wo

Read: 704

Download: 231