Las colocaciones y sus trampas: un estudio de corpus

Abstract

On the relationship between collocations and the polysemy of its components: what does the corpus tells us? It is well known that lexical polysemy affects not only the content of words, but also their syntagmatic behavior, both in their valence and in their participation in partially fixed combinations such as collocations. This study experimentally addresses this issue by focusing on the Spanish polysemic word trampa ‘trap’, ‘cheating’, ‘fraud’, ‘unpaid debt’...), which is a representative example, since its variated lexical meanings may modify its collocability. Our work was carried out in two phases: first, we search for and count all the recurring combinations of the Word tramp with a verb or with an adjective in a macro-corpus (esTenTen18), examining how its collocability varies according to the meanings of the base. In the second phase, we check whether the obtained recurrent combinations are collocations or free word combinations, using the Log Dice statistic measure, which turns out to be a quite effective tool for the identification of collocations.