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John McHardy Sinclair's lexical items – an introduction
Photo © Floyd Anderson
In order for us to be able to move onto our analysis with the historical news corpus (in later sections),
we will first need to examine the origins of the five categories of co-selection that make up the late Birmingham University professor John McHardy Sinclair's "lexical term" (Sinclair, 2004).
Open-choice model and the idiom principle
The five categories of co-selection of a lexical term originates from Sinclair's idiom
principle (1991) in which he emphasized the "non-random nature of language" as oppose to his
open-choice model (also known as "slot-and filler") where he sees language as a product "of many complex choices".
Sinclair described his open-choice model as "probably the normal way
of seeing and describing language" (1991, p. 109). This model, in general, describes the basic
restrictions on the possible choice of lexical items that can be used to syntactically fill in every
"next vacancy" appearing in any given text. The model, hence, forms the basis of most uses of
the grammar. On the contrary, Sinclair's idiom principle is based on the presumption that users
of a language select naturally from a set of pre-constructed phrases, or idioms, as the name of the
model implies. With the two theories presumably going in opposite directions, no one theory
seems to be able to provide one comprehensive explanation. Statistically speaking, Erman and
Warren (2000) found in their research that about 45% of all authentic text goes with the open-choice
model, whereas the remaining 55% (a little more than half) belongs to the idiom principle.
But this does not mean that these two models are competing against with one another. In fact,
according to Sinclair's original concept, the two theories actually work hand-in-hand in which
case the open-choice analysis "could be imagined as an analytical process which goes on in
principle all the time, but whose results are only intermittently called for." (1991, p. 114)
In 1996 and 1998, Sinclair further expounded his idiom principle to include the five
categories of co-selection that make up the lexical item, namely, the invariable core word (or
core words), the obligatory semantic prosody, the optional collocation and colligation from Firth
(1957), and, last but not the least, the semantic preference.
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• and more to come
8:27pm
Hongkong Time
He likes to study about the
latest advancements in computer technology and shares his views on his blog.
I am honored
to have obtained Professor Sidney Gluck's (right) permission
to allow me to repost here some of his work and interview
related to China and socialism.
Professor Gluck is professor emertius at the New School University in New York.
A classical Marxist, Gluck has been studying China for 60 years
in history and modern development. He has lectured all over
the country and still welcomes engagement at the age of 94 – photo © Sandi Bachom
