A Corpus-based Study On Co-occurrence Of English Determiners

Determiner is first put forward by Sapir in 1921.Up to the present,the study of Determiners has been focused on their definition,recognition,sequencing and the relation between Determiners and Nouns.Nevertheless,most scholars don't attach enough importance to collocations among Determiners.Therefore,this paper is a corpus-based study on co-occurrence of English Determiners.I mainly study BNC,and ANC is used as a reference corpus to study the collocations of English Determiners,taking into consideration their representativeness,scale,registers,and annotation.The research is carried out as follows:Two-word patterns are generated by permutation and combination based on Determiner sequencing to acquire the raw frequency in two corpora.T-scores and MI-scores are calculated to measure the collocational strength of patterns and Determiner collocations are ranked by collocational strength.What's more,the distribution of Determiners across different registers is mapped and the regularity of the co-occurrence of Determiners and Nouns in terms of number is summarized.By comparison of their MI-scores and PMW,similarities and differences between British English and American English are concluded.A number of significant English Determiner collocations are discovered,especially, Post-determiner collocations.According to the proportion of Determiners co-occurring with four Noun categories,the most frequent Noun category collocated with Determiners is the singular common Noun;however,Determiners seldom collocate with common Nouns,neutral for number.In terms of register,the frequency of the matching strings per million words is acquired to make comparisons in spoken,newspaper,fiction and academic registers. Determiners frequently occur in spoken and academic genres but rarely occur in newspaper and fiction.Chi-square tests show there is no significant difference about the use of Determiners between two languages.The sig-nificant Determiner collocations are concluded by positivism,particularly,the regularities on Post-determiners co-occurrence.The approach used in this paper is different from introspective method;Determiner collocations based on corpus are more reliable and authentic,which is preferable to guide theoretical research and teaching.