A Corpus-based Study on Collocations of Keywords in English Business Articles on the European Debt Crisis

A Corpus-based Study on Collocations of
Keywords in English Business Articles on the
European Debt Crisis

Đào Thị Ngọc Nguyên

Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ
Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành: Ngôn ngữ Anh; Mã số: 60 22 15
Người hướng dẫn: TS. Phạm Thị Thanh Thủy
Năm bảo vệ: 2012

Abstract: One of the most problematic areas when vocabulary is dealt with is
collocation. It is often seen as arbitrary and overwhelming, a seemingly
insurmountable obstacle to the attainment of native like fluency. This piece of work
presents a study on collocations of keywords within a 20,000-word corpus of various
English business articles about the European debt crisis 2011. The aim of the present
study is to find out high-frequency words used within the corpus, and above all, to
examine collocation patterns of keywords that distinguish the business genre of the
selected texts. Concordance Program 3.3 is the main methods employed throughout
the study for the data collection and analysis. The major findings of the research are a
good number of striking collocation patterns some of the most recurrent keywords
possess. The major findings drawn from the research is the basis for the
recommendation of pedagogical implications and suggestions for raising students'
consciousness of the English collocation acquisition.

Keywords: Ngôn ngữ; Tiếng Anh; Từ vựng

Content
I. INTRODUCTION
I.1.Statement of the problem and rationale of the study
However, no matter how convinced learners of English in principles of the importance

of vocabulary, the vocabulary acquisition actually poses enormous difficulties to them. One of
the most complicated problems arising when vocabulary is dealt with is how to combine and
use words appropriately in accordance with culture or language conventions, which is often
referred to as “collocation competence” (Hill,1999).
Collocations are usually defined as words that typically occur in association with other
words; in reality, they run through the whole of the English language and they are as old as
the language itself. No piece of natural spoken and written English is totally free of

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collocations. Because of their widespread use, the role that collocations play in the language
is absolutely undeniable.
For learners of English in general, with collocation competence, they should have the
ability to combine lexical (and grammatical) chunks in order to produce fluent, accurate, as
well as semantically and stylistically appropriate utterances. For business English learners in
particular, a good knowledge of collocation patterns in English is also of great importance.
The most important characteristics of the language of business English, as opposed to the
language of general English, are a sense of purpose, intercultural dimension and a need for
clear, straightforward and concise communication (Ellis & Johnson, 1994). In order to
achieve these broad objectives of business English learners, teachers have to find out the best
ways to teach business performance skills such as socializing, telephoning, meeting,
presentation, and report writing. In all these situations, collocation competence is significantly
essential.
With the rise of computing power as well as the acceptance of corpus linguistics since
1990s, collocations have received serious treatment. The dramatic rise in processing power of
computers now makes it possible to quickly compose lists of frequency for lexical items in a
large corpus. At the same time, there have been a large number of different software programs
installed for keywords and collocations extract from corpus data. Such software packages
have made easier access to the investigation into typical lexical items and their collocations of
any particular text genres.
With the writer‟s personal interest in collocations as a researcher and observations of

students‟ tough experience in dealing with collocations in business discourse as a tutor of
business learners, this thesis provides a comprehensive research on collocations of keywords
in a variety of business articles written about a currently hot topic for business learners, the
European debt crisis. The thesis, therefore, is carried out in the hope that it may be of some
help to business learners of English as well as those who find themselves interested in English
semantics and collocation-related issues.
I.2. Aims of the study
The aim of this research is to conduct a close investigation into collocations of keywords
from a corpus of a certain number of business articles written about the European debt crisis.

3
To be specific, it identifies words with high frequency of occurrence within the chosen corpus
and examines their collocations. The research, therefore, is carried out to answer the
following research questions:
 What are the top high-frequency words in the corpus of written articles about the
European debt crisis?
 What are significant patterns and features of collocations of such keywords?
I.3.Scope of the study
This study is about to discuss keywords and their collocations in 15 written articles
about the European debt crisis. The designed corpus of over 20,000 words is taken from
online business articles from websites of high reputation such as The Washington Post, Money
CNN, ….Keywords chosen for analysis of significant patterns of collocation within the study
are those which can distinguish the business genre of the selected articles.
I.4. Structure of the thesis
The study is organized as follows. Chapter I-Introduction- is firstly introduced,
briefly stating the rationale, aims, scope and organization of the study. Secondly, chapter II-
Literature review- deals with the literature setting the background for the study. Thirdly,
chapter III- Research Methodology- is a presentation on the methodology of the research,
referring to the research design, data collection procedures and analytical framework of the
study. Next, on chapter IV-Results and Discussion-, a detailed discussion of collocations

keywords in the selected corpus is carried out, through which some interesting aspects can be
revealed. In chapter V-Conclusion- major findings of the study and pedagogical implications
and suggestions are presented.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW
II.1. Corpus linguistics

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Corpus linguistics (hereafter CL) deals with the principles and practice of using such
corpora in language study. As a branch of linguistics, it differs from traditional linguistics as it
is related to the study of authentic examples of language (Sinclair, 1997). The main focus on
CL is to discover pattern of authentic language in order to verify a hypothesis about language,
for example, to determine how the usage of a particular sound, word, or syntactic construction
varies. This, in turn, allows learners and researchers to ascertain related linguistic patterns and
structures for the goals of their research.
II.2. Sense and sense relations
In Nguyen Hoa‟s words (Nguyen Hoa, 2000:56), "sense is a philosophical term for
meaning". Meaning and sense are closely related; however, sense is sometimes distinguished
from meaning. The meaning of a word is seen as part of the language system whereas sense is
the realization of this meaning in speech. According to John Lyons (1995:80), the sense of an
expression may be defined as the set, or network, of sense-relations that hold between it and
other expressions of the same language.
Sense relation is the kind of relationship between vocabulary items when they are
arranged in texts, spoken or written: how they are related to one another in terms of their
meaning; how they may or may not substitute for one another; how similar or how different
they are to each other and so on.
II.3. Transference of meaning
In English, there are basically two types of meaning transference, namely metaphor
and metonymy.
II.3.1. Metaphor

According to Nguyen Hoa (2004:105), "metaphor is the transference of meaning from
one object to another based on the similarity between these two objects". Traditionally,
metaphors have been viewed as implicit comparisons.

II.3.2. Metonymy
According to Nguyen Hoa (2004:112), metonymy can be defined as "the substitution
of one word for another with which it is associated". Thus, metonymy works by continuity
rather than similarity, which means that instead of the name of one object or notion we use the
name of another because these objects are associated or closely related.
According to Lyons (1995:314), body parts are favourite sources of metonymy, and
many such expressions have been incorporated into the language, with words like hand, heart,
head as in have a hand in, bear one's heart, or keep your head.

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II.3.3. Other types of meaning transference
Besides metaphor and metonymy, there are other types of meaning transference
involving hyperbole, litotes, irony, and euphemisms.
II.4. Collocation
II.4.1. Definition of collocation
Different linguists have different definitions of collocation. Moira Runcie in Oxford
Collocation Dictionary gives a general definition in which collocation is defined as the way
words combine in a language to produce natural-sounding speech and writing. To a native
speaker, these combinations are highly predictable; to a learner they are anything but.
Specifically speaking, Chitra Fernando, Richards and others (1996:62) states that collocation
refers to the restrictions on how words can be used together, for examples which prepositions
are used with particular verbs or which verbs and nouns are used together. In Kjellmer
(1994:xiv & xxxiii), collocation is "such recurring sequences of items as are grammatically
well formed". Kathleen R. McKeown and Dragomir R. Radev in their paper on Collocations
regard collocations as word pairs and phrases that are commonly used in language with no
general syntactic or semantic rules applied. Additionally, many linguists have tried to define

collocation by presenting its functions. Halliday (1966) and Sinclair (1966) introduced the
notion that patterns of collocation can form the basis for a lexical analysis of language
alternative to, and independent of, the grammatical analysis. They regarded the two levels of
analysis as being complementary, with neither of the two being subsumed by the other.
Holding the same idea, McIntosh (1961:328) and Mitchell (1971) presented the lexical and
grammatical analyses as interdependent: "Collocations are to be studied within grammatical
matrices which in turn depend for their recognition on the observation of collocation
similarities" (Mitchell, 1971:65). Later, Halliday (1966:151&157) argued that the collocation
patterns of lexical items can lead to generalization at the lexical level. Sinclair (1966:412 &
1974:16) proposed that a lexical item can be defined from its collocation pattern.
II.4.2. Properties of collocation
II.4.2.1. Collocation is arbitrary.
In the first place, collocation is typically characterized as arbitrary, which means that
words are often combined with each other without any particular reasons.
II.4.2.2. Collocation is language-specific.
Secondly, collocation is language-specific as is nature persists across languages. As
Larson (1984:141) points out, every language interprets the physical worlds in its own way
and has its own convention; therefore, it governs different collocability of words. For

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instances, in French, the phrase régler la circulation is used to refer to a policeman who
directs traffic, the English collocation. In Russian and German, the direct translation of
regulate is used; only in English is direct used in place of regulate. Similarly, American and
British English exhibit differences in similar phrases. Thus, in American English one says set
the table and make a decision; whereas in British English, the corresponding phrases are lay
the table and take a decision.
II.4.2.3. Collocation is recurrent in context.
While the two properties mentioned above indicate difficulties in determining what is
an acceptable collocation, on the positive side it is clear that collocation occurs frequently in
similar contexts. It is possible to observe collocations in samples of language. Generally,

collocations are those word pairs which occur frequently together in the same environment,
but do not include lexical items which have a high overall frequency in language. This
property, in fact, has exploited by many researchers in natural language processing in identify
collocation automatically.
II.4.3. Classifications of collocation
By examining a huge number of collocates of the same syntactic category, Kathleen R.
McKeown and Dragomir R. Radev in their paper on Collocations identify similarities and
differences in their behavior. Distinctions are made between grammatical collocations and
semantic collocations. In their opinion, grammatical collocations often contain prepositions,
including paired syntactic categories such as verb + preposition, adjective + preposition, and
noun + preposition. In these cases, the open-class word is called the base and determines the
words it can collocate with, the collocation indicator. Semantic collocations are lexically
restricted word pairs, where only a subset of the synonyms of the collocation indicator can be
used in the same lexical context.
In Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary(Moira Runcie:2002) collocation is
classified both in terms of the grammatical pattern and the strength of collocation. Firstly,
according to the grammatical pattern, there exist thirteen types of collocations as follows,
including: adjective + noun, quantifier + noun, verb + noun, noun + noun, preposition + noun,
noun + preposition, adverb + verb, verb + verb, verb + preposition, verb + adjective, adverb +
adjective, and adjective + preposition.
Secondly, according to the strength of collocation, collocations are categorized into
four types: unique collocations, strong collocations, medium-strength collocations, and weak
collocations.


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III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
III.1 Data collecting instruments
III.1.1 Construction of Corpus
Since the study is primarily a corpus-based analysis of collocations, its findings come

from a linguistic analysis of a substantial number of written articles. The corpus of the study
is constructed from 15 extracted articles from four databases.
III.1.1.1 Database
The database in this thesis refers to the set of publications from which articles for
analysis have been extracted. It consists of the following journals: the New York Times,
Washington Post, The Guardian, CNNmoney.com, and Bloomberg.com. The mentioned-
above newspapers were chosen to serve as the database for the study because of their
reliability and reputation for famous authors, prestige presses and worldwide use in the world
of economy.
III.1.1.2 Extracted business articles
As mentioned above, 15 articles were extracted from the sample publications with a
view to identifying, then examining keywords with high-frequency of occurrence and their
collocation patterns. The selected articles are all written about the European debt crisis in
2011, providing readers with up-to-date features, critical and systematical analysis of the
crisis-related aspects. The following table summarizes the corpus used in the study, including
databases and the extracted texts. A detailed referencing of each selected text can be found in
Appendix.
Table 1: List of the selected articles
Database
Information of the Articles
(Author, Date of publication, Title)
Average Text
Length
Washington
Post
Ezra Klein (8 May 2011) Everything You Need to Know
about the European Debt Crisis in One Post
1392 words
Louis Cooper (3 Aug 2011) Debt Crisis in Europe:
Worries Grow of Spread to Larger Economies of Italy,

Spain
527 words
Alex Witt (05 Feb 2011) Debt Crisis Unsettles European
Economy
1024 words
Money.cnn
Ben Rooney (26 Nov 2011) Europe’s Debt Crisis: Five
Things You Need to Know
1420 words

8
Ben Rooney (1 Feb 2011) Europe’s Debt Crisis: Where
Things Stand
1075 words
Ben Rooney (14 Nov 2011) Europe: New Leaders, Same
Debt Crisis
723 words
(6 Jan 2011) Europe’s Debt Crisis: No Clear End in Sight
817 words
(24 Apr 2011) Europe’s Debt Crisis Rears Its Ugly Head
1188 words


Bloomberg
Simon Johnson (23 Jan 2011) Europe’s Debt Crisis is
Still Likely to End Badly
902 words
Peter Stanners (8 Jan 2011) A Short Summary of the
Sovereign Debt Crisis
1402 words

The
Guardian
Larry Elliot, Heather Stewards and John Hooper (9 Nov
2011) European Debt Crisis Spiraling Out of Control
1383 words
(9 Aug 2011) Debt Crisis: A Default in Europe Could
Benefit Poor Countries
2226 words
(10 Feb 2011) European Debt Crisis Pitches Germany
against Greece
450 words
The New
York Times
Donna Rogers (02 Dec 2011) An Overview of the
European Debt Crisis
806 words
Hannelore Foerster (26 Aug 2011) European Debt Crisis
5748 words
Total Corpus Length
21,083 words


III.1.2 Concordance Program
Concordance Program is a computer program that is helpful to the corpus linguist. It
is used to create word lists, count word frequency, compare different usages of a word,
analyze keywords, and find phrases and idioms. The Concordance Program is a general-
purpose working tool for studying of text, whether the text is literary, linguistic, historical,
philosophical, legal, commercial, and political or of other kinds. In this study, the
Concordance Program 3.3 was used to search for high-frequency words and their collocations
in the corpus of business articles.

III.2 Data collecting procedures

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The research was conducted in the following steps. Firstly, articles written about the
European debt crisis in 2011 were copied from the websites of selected newspapers and
journals, and saved as Plain Text. Next, dates, titles, and the names of author in the articles
were deleted from the Text. Only the articles bodies were left for analysis. The corpus was
then fully developed from the completed Plain Text file. Finally, the Concordance Program
3.3 was used to investigate the constructed corpus. From the made full concordance, results
and findings of the research were taken out for analysis.

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The data of the study are interpreted in the following steps. To begin with, analyses of
the corpus are conducted using the Concordance Program 3.3, available in website:
www.concordancesoftware.co.uk. To get the quantitative results, 100 words with highest
percentage of occurrence are listed in tables with reference to their rank and relative
frequency. Out of those 100 lexis, the top 25 content words are selected, from which
keywords are brought out for full analysis. A keyword is one which has unusually high, or
low, frequency in comparison to a base reference corpus (Berber Sardinha, 1999) and thus
may characterize a text or a genre (Scott, 2009). Within this study, keywords are recurrent and
candifferentiate the business genre of the chosen articles. However, as this is a corpus-based
study on collocations, frequency alone may not be adequate; some measures of collocation
strength is also required. Thanks to the relatively small dimensions of the corpus, a close
reading of the texts could be undertaken both manually and by computer. Therefore, in the
next step, concordance of the keywords is scanned in order to bring an overview of
collocation patterns of keywords. From that, final decision about target words for analysis is
given to those with a wide and remarkable range of collocations.
Once the target keywords are identified, an in-depth investigation into different
collocates of the words will be carried out. The investigation, in turn, is diversified as
collocations are examined as regards their every possible semantic and syntactic feature. For

example, various senses of a word in different collocations can be interpreted through careful
definition of phrases it involve, through comparisons with words convey the same meanings,
or by the researcher‟s illustrating example sentences or contexts.
IV.1 Quantitative Results
Research question 1: What are the top high-frequency words in the corpus of written
business articles about the European debt crisis 2011?

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Table 2 below illustrates frequencies of the first 100 words in the corpus of well over
20,000 words from 15 selected written articles about the debt crisis in Europe in 2011.
Table 2: Top 100 high-frequency words from the constructed corpus
N
Word
Freq
%
N
Word
Freq
%
1
THE
1402
6.676
51
NEW
56
0.267
2
TO
763

3.633
52
OUT
56
0.267
3
OF
592
2.819
53
IF
55
0.262
4
AND
452
2.152
54
BANK
54
0.257
5
A
449
2.138
55
ALSO
53
0.252
6

THAT
301
1.433
56
EUROPE
53
0.252
7
FOR
214
1.019
57
BONDS
51
0.243
8
DEBT
179
0.852
58
MARKETS
50
0.238
9
IS
176
0.838
59
FUND
49

0.233
10
ON
149
0.709
60
ECONOMY
47
0.224
11
EUROPEAN
148
0.705
61
LEADERS
46
0.219
12
AS
142
0.676
62
ABOUT
45
0.214
13
BE
142
0.676
63

BEEN
43
0.205
14
GREECE
124
0.590
64
HAD
43
0.205
15
IT
124
0.590
65
PERCENT
43
0.205
16
BY
122
0.581
66
THERE
43
0.205

11
17

ITS
121
0.576
67
CENTRAL
42
0.200
18
HAVE
117
0.557
68
INTO
41
0.195
19
HAS
112
0.533
69
OR
40
0.190
20
WITH
111
0.529
70
MAY
39

0.186
21
WAS
105
0.500
71
AUSTERITY
38
0.181
22
BUT
98
0.467
72
FISCAL
38
0.181
23
ARE
97
0.462
73
THAN
38
0.181
24
CRISIS
96
0.457
74

UNION
38
0.181
25
EURO
91
0.433
75
YEAR
38
0.181
26
WOULD
91
0.433
76
ECB
37
0.176
27
FROM
85
0.405
77
DEFAULT
36
0.171
28
WILL
84

0.400
78
GROWTH
36
0.171
29
AT
81
0.386
79
OVER
36
0.171
30
COUNTRIES
80
0.381
80
SOME
36
0.171
31
THEIR
78
0.371
81
WHEN
36
0.171
32

FINANCIAL
77
0.367
82
WERE
35
0.167
33
THIS
77
0.367
83
GERMANY
34
0.162
34
BAILOUT
74
0.352
84
AFTER
33
0.157
35
BANKS
73
0.348
85
EUROZONE
33

0.157
36
ITALY
73
0.348
86
GOVERNMENTS
33
0.157

12
37
NOT
68
0.324
87
LAST
32
0.152
38
BILLION
67
0.319
88
MONEY
32
0.152
39
MORE
67

0.319
89
NATIONS
32
0.152
40
ECONOMIC
63
0.300
90
MEASURES
31
0.148
41
THEY
63
0.300
91
OTHER
31
0.148
42
WHICH
62
0.295
92
ALL
30
0.143
43

COULD
61
0.290
93
MARKET
30
0.143
44
GOVERNMENT
61
0.290
94
NEED
30
0.143
45
AN
60
0.286
95
ONE
30
0.143
46
UP
59
0.281
96
SAY
30

0.143
47
SAID
58
0.276
97
WHILE
30
0.143
48
SPAIN
58
0.276
98
COUNTRY
29
0.138
49
GREEK
56
0267
99
NEXT
29
0.138
50
INVESTORS
56
0.267
100

CAN
29
0.138
It can be obviously seen from the table that, as in most English written texts, the most
frequent items in the corpus of the research are functional (or grammatical) words such as the,
to, of, and, a, that, for. From the 8
th
item in the word list, the key (or content) words that
distinguish the business genre of the corpus start to appear. Among these are debt, European,
Greece, crisis, Euro, countries, financial, bailout and so on. Table 3 below shows the first 25
key words from the high-frequency word list of the corpus.
Table 3: First 25keywords from the corpus

13
N
Word
Freq
%
N
Word
Freq
%
1
DEBT
179
0.852
14
SAID
58
0.276

2
EUROPEAN
148
0.705
15
SPAIN
58
0.276
3
GREECE
124
0.590
16
GREEK
56
0.267
4
CRISIS
96
0.457
17
INVESTORS
56
0.267
5
EURO
91
0.433
18
NEW

56
0.267
6
COUNTRIES
80
0.381
19
BANK
54
0.257
7
FINANCIAL
77
0.367
20
EUROPE
53
0.252
8
BAILOUT
74
0.352
21
EUROPE
53
0.252
9
BANKS
73
0.348

22
BONDS
51
0.243
10
ITALY
73
0.348
23
MARKETS
50
0.238
11
BILLION
67
0.319
24
FUND
49
0.233
12
ECONOMIC
63
0.300
25
ECONOMY
47
0.224
13
GOVERNMENT

61
0.290




The top 25 keywords from the corpus, as shown in Table 3, are perhaps noticeable for
a large number of geographical names for the zone and countries in which the debt crisis
occurred, accurately reflecting the fact that the three countries Greece, Italy, and Spain are
among the most unfortunate victims of the crisis.

IV.2 Collocation analysis of content keywords
Research question 2: What are significant patterns of collocations of the content keywords
from the corpus?

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IV.2.1 DEBT and CRISIS
DEBT and CRISIS are the top high-frequency content words of business genre among
all the words in the selected articles with the relative frequency of 179 (0.852%) and 96
(0.457) respectively. Both of the two words take a wide range of collocates within the corpus.
They are selected for analysis at the same time and in the same section as they themselves
frequently occur together throughout the articles and their collocates share a good number of
common features.
At the first glance, it is noteworthy that almost all of the adjectives shown in Table 4
below are used attributively within the corpus, coming before the noun CRISIS they modify
(only continuing, looming, imminent, unshakable are excluded). Semantically, these are
general adjectives susceptible to objective measure since they are used to describe the
existence and development of the debt crisis. This should be a signal feature of the corpus
genre; the objectiveness and concision must be guaranteed in the provision of factual
information in business articles in order to accurately report the issues.

Table 4: Adjectives collocating with CRISIS
financial
immediate
looming
possible
ongoing
underlying
economic
sovereign
mounting
full-blown
continuing
growing
potential
imminent
slow-moving
unshakable
full-on
European


Adjectives in the combinations with DEBT as shown in Table 5, on the other hand, are
remarkable for the predominance of words indicating the „debt owner‟ such as European,

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Greek, Italian, Irish, or nation’s and country’s – nouns in the possessive case functioning as
adjectives. This tells readers about countries that suffered the most in the stories told.
Table 5: Adjectives collocating with DEBT
ever-increasing
new

huge
rising
sovereign
similar
bad
Irish
European
private
total
next
existing
sustainable
nation‟s
country's
risky
unpayable
looming
immediate
distressed
Greek
Greece‟s
Italian
Spanish
Jamaica‟s
French

Both of the two groups of adjectival collocations are also distinct for a significant
number of –ing adjectives coming from the same families with verbs describing trends to
indicate the current status of the debt crisis at the time it was written about. Some of other
examples are continuing, looming, rising, growing, ongoing and so on.

While most of the adjectives in Table 4and Table 5are widely used, some of the words
should be focused for attention as when in collocation with CRISIS and DEBT such as
immediate, unshakable, or bad, which may convey such meaning that causes confusion
among learners.
A look at the nominal collocations of CRISIS in Table 8 and DEBT in Table 9 above
reveals various compound nouns of the words in the corpus, including debt crisis, future
crisis, crisis management, crisis victims, debt burden, debt payment, housing debt, public debt
and so on.


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Table 6: Nouns collocating with CRISIS
Left-side nouns
Right-side nouns
debt
credit
management
mode
3-year-old
funding
response
victims
future
banking
approach
hit
2008
US

Europe



Table 7: Nouns collocating with DEBT
Left-side nouns
Right-side nouns
government

load
crisis
Euro zone

level
burden
housing

problem
reduction
mortgage

deal
woes
public

auctions
ratios

restructuring
rating


default
payment


repudiation
measure


write-downs
spiral


disease
market

17


exposure
agreement
As it can be seen from the two tables, combination between CRISIS or DEBT and
their identified left-hand nouns results in a number of headed (or endocentric) compounds In
such compounds, CRISIS and DEBT become the heads while their collocatesare the
modifiers. While the modifiers in compoundsof CRISIS can be classified into three sub-
categories meaning „location‟ (US crisis, Europe crisis), „time‟ (3-year-old crisis, 2008 crisis,
future crisis) and „field‟ (debt crisis, funding crisis, banking crisis), DEBT gets its modifiers

to denote „sections‟ (government debt, euro zone debt, public debt) or „kind‟ of debt (housing
debt, mortgage debt).
The number of right-hand nouns collocating with CRISIS is six only, so they are far
outnumbered by those occurring with DEBT. These right-hand nouns when conjoining
CRISIS and DEBT make headed compounds, including crisis mode, crisis victims, debt
burden, debt problems, debt load and more, in which CRISIS and DEBT function as
modifiers and the nouns are heads. The other groups of combinations, consisting of crisis
management, crisis response,debt restructuring, debt payment, debt reduction, debt
repudiation, debt write-downs; on the other hand,can be considered verbal compounds. These
compounds are related to syntactic phrases, as in:
(crisis management)
manage the crisis
management of the crisis
(debt restructuring)
restructure debt
restructuring of debt
Interestingly, there occur several „long‟ compounds of DEBT and CRISIS in the
corpus. The two words here can combine with more than one noun, resulting in compounds

18
made out of other compounds. Examples may include debt crisis hit, private sector debt deal,
landmark debt restructuring, Eurozone debt crisis victims, and debt market panic.
In discussion of the left-side verbal collocates in Table 8 and Table 9, it can obviously
be seen that in all cases in the corpus, CRISIS and DEBT go with transitive verbs. The
resulting combinations are verbal phrases in which CRISIS and DEBT, preceded by a
determiner, is the direct object of the verbs. These collocations, though diversified, seem to
mainly indicate people‟s reactions to the debt crisis together with their hope of keeping
control over and quickly getting over the tough time of the economy. Examples of such
combinations may include survive the crisis, prevent a credit crisis, expand the crisis, resolve
the crisis, handle the crisis, stave off a crisis, contain the crisis, restructure its debt, hide its

debt, downgrade Greek debt. Some of the structures should be given attention to, including
contain the crisis, forgive the crisis, service a debt for the somewhat technical senses.
Most of the right-side verbs, in contrast, are intransitive. Importantly, the co-
occurrence of CRISIS with these right-side collocates results in various metaphorical
expressions of ECONOMY AS A LIVING ORGANISM. The movement of CRISIS is
considered physical movement of things through such collocates as bubble up, spread
(moving in the air), ripple (moving in the water), or drag, enter (moving on the ground). Also
through the usage of some other verbs like pummel or strip, CRISIS is metaphorically
described as the doer of physical actions of things.
Table 8: Verbs collocating with CRISIS
Left-side verbs
Right-side verbs
prevent
contain
unfold
pummel
handle
expand
enter
spiral

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move
resolve
spread
drag
stop
address
affect
reach

start
survive
deepen
strip
stave off
renew
bubble up
ripple
create

surface
begin

Table 9: Verbs collocating with DEBT
Left-hand verbs
Right-hand verbs
hide
sell off
downgrade
make up
restructure
pay off
forgive
rise
face
cancel
half

buy
issue

reduce

deal with

service


Table 10: Other patterns of CRISIS in the corpus
crisis of confidence
in the response to the crisis
at the root of the crisis
solution to the crisis
infection for the crisis
prospect of the crisis
phase of the crisis
resolution of the crisis
severity of the crisis
a cure-all for the crisis

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sense of the crisis
before the crisis
during the crisis
in a state of crisis
in crisis


Table 11: Other patterns of DEBT in the corpus
rating of debt
billion of debt

form of debt
amounts of debt
purchases of debt
write-downs on debt
a great deal of debt
size of debt
price of debt

Table 10 and Table 11 above give information about collocation patterns of CRISIS in
the rest of the corpus. With the only exception of crisis of confidence – a fixed expression
denoting „a situation in which people no longer believe that a government or an economic
system is working properly, and will no longer support it or work with it‟ (Longman
Dictionary of Contemporary English), in all other combinations, CRISIS functions as the
object of the preposition in a prepositional phrase. In many cases, these prepositional phrases,
for example infection of the crisis, a cure-all for the crisis, and resolution to the crisis, play
the role of post-modifier in another noun phrase.
IV.2.2 ECONOMIC
With total frequency of 63 (0.300%), ECONOMIC ranks third in all the adjectives
occurred within the corpus (after European and financial). Originally, ECONOMIC itself can
be treated as both attributive and predicative adjective where the word makes the sense of
„relating to trade, industry, and the management of money‟ and „producing enough profit to

21
continue‟ respectively. It is, however, significant to notice that within the corpus ECONOMIC
is used attributively in its every occurrence, then becomes non-gradable. With the sense this
attributive adjective can convey, ECONOMIC, apparently, is employed to denote „a field‟. As
a result, the word can absolutely have a wide selection of collocates.
Table 12: Nouns collocating ECONOMIC in the corpus
boom
crisis

growth
downturn
contraction
malaise
prospect
slump
activity
powerhouse
meltdown
laggard
union
changes
slowdown
recovery
backdrop
fundamentals
improvement
stress
integration
output
order
affairs
reform
measures
advisers
theory
interest
stability
conditions
outlook

competitiveness
woes
clout

The groups of collocates in Table 12 above may be characterized by a comparatively
large number of nouns illustrating the good and bad times of the economy like contraction,
backdrop, recovery, meltdown, stress, growth, slowdown and so on. This predominance, in
turn, can be representative of the constructed corpus as the central topic- the debt crisis- in
itself contains lots of „ups and downs‟.
The use of these nominal collocates also reveals the presence of a metaphor of
ECONOMY AS A LIVING ORGANISM. The state of the economy is a state of physical
health (lexis include malaise, recovery, growth) or of mental health (with stress); similarly,

22
the movement of the economy is regarded as physical movements of things (with boom,
slump, slowdown, meltdown, or downturn).
Very frequently, the compound of ECONOMIC and its collocate is preceded by
another adjective; plenty of composite nominals are constructed consequently. In Table 13
below, all of the combinations are typical of Adjective + Noun syntactic phrases (i.e. phrases
like an economic activity).
Table 13: Composite nominal containing ECONOMIC (with modification within the
head)
painful economic contraction
global economic malaise
dim economic prospects
decade-long economic slump
overall economic activity
declining economic activity
global economic meltdown
longtime economic laggard

unrecognized economic problems
underlying economic problems
structural economic changes
weak economic backdrop
sound economic fundamentals
closer economic integration
gross economic output
new economic measures
uncertain economic outlook
similar economic woes
In some other cases, though less frequently, composite nominal can be formedwhen
the combination of ECONOMIC and the nominal collocate is separated by another adjective.
Accordingly, composite nominal of this kind has its modifier made from the coordination of
two different adjectives.
Table 14: Composite nominal containing ECONOMIC (with coordination in the
modifier)

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political and economic union
economic and financial problems
economic and geopolitical order
political and economic factors
political and economic outlook
IV.2.3 MARKETS
MARKETS occurs in the selected articles with a total frequency of 50 (equivalent to
0.238%). Though the density of the word may be lower than that of some other high-
frequency lexis in the corpus, by nature, MARKETS is far more complicated. While the word
possesses a remarkably wide collocation range, its sense is richly varied from one
combination to another.
In the following section, identified collocations of MARKETS from the corpus are

classified into different groups according to senses and meaning transferences. Combinations
at which MARKETS bears comparatively equal senses are put into one single group.
First and foremost, in its many occurrences (just well under 50 percent of all),
MARKETS means „the total amount of trade in a particular kind of goods‟. With this
sense,financial is the top collocate of MARKETS, while all of the other combinations are
made from compounds of MARKETS and such nouns as bond, credit, capital, debt, currency.
This feature can be explicable as financial suggests the whole field; its relationship with the
other nominal collocates, bond, credit and so on, then can be described as „container and
contents‟. Above all, these sets of collocates can partially reflect the more or less same themes
among the selected articles, at which financial markets, as well as their related branches, have
become the eye of the crisis storm.

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In the second group, MARKETS are used to refer to „people who buy and sell goods
in competition with each other‟. In many cases, MARKETS is pre-modified by the definite
article the. By and large, this sense of the word is somewhat obvious and can be easily
recognized thanks to the remarkable collocates it takes. Almost all of the words occurring
with MARKETS here indicate actions and feelings that should be done or experienced by
human beings only. Good examples may include its left-hand verbs (calm, trouble, reassure)
and right-hand verbs (know, experience, lose faith, react, worry, pressure, or price).
Though less popular than the two senses discussed above, the meaning of MARKETS
as „a particular country, area or section of population that might buy goods‟ should still be
noticeable in the corpus. Actually, this sense is made by the modifiers of MARKETS (nouns
and adjectives)which denote the meaning of „location‟ or „section‟ like world, global,
China’s, open, private and so on. Some of the technical terms in economics can be founded in
this field of sense such as open market, primary market, and secondary market. Definitions of
these terms (adapted from Oxford Business English Dictionary 2005), therefore, should be
given to aid understanding.
The variations of meaning that MARKETS have throughout the corpus should indicate
the presence of metonymy. The word market takes its originally literate meaning as „an

occasion where people buy and sell goods or the open area/building where they meet to do
this‟ (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 2011). In analyzed sentences, there is a
transference of meaning at which the metonymy substitution include:
 the concrete (market as a place/event) is used instead of the abstract (market as the total
amount of trade)
 the place/event is used for attendants (market as the people who buy and sell goods)
 the place/event is used for institutions or organizations (market as a particular country, area
or section of population that might buy goods)


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V. CONCLUSION
V.1 Major findings
The research conducts a corpus-based study of approximately 20,000 words in 15
English written articles about the European debt crisis 2011. It has attempted to answer the
two research questions: (1) What are the top high-frequency words in the corpus? (2) What
are significant patterns of collocations of some keywords in the corpus? Concordance
Program 3.3 is the fundamental instrument employed in order to investigate lexis features of
the corpus, then helps provide full answers to the set research questions.
As regards the first research question, the top 100 words with highest frequency of
occurrence are found out. Accordingly, the selected articles in the corpus bear a similarity to
texts of different genres when they are dominated by a number of functional words.
The answer to the first research question also helps to bring the researcher an
overview of the high-frequency content words in the corpus. Four content words, including
DEBT, CRISIS, ECONOMIC, and MARKET, are selected for a full collocation analysis. The
lexis is then referred to as keywords since they are recurrent throughout the corpus and
possess outstanding collocation patterns and features at the same time.The analysis of
collocations of the four selected keywords in the corpus provides interesting information
about their semantic and syntactic features.
In discussion of syntax, collocations under study are noticeable a variety of

compounds of some types such as headed and verbal compounds, and composite nominal
with the modifications in heads, or the coordination in modifiers.
Considering semantic features, the choice of collocates going with chosen keywords is
largely determined by the common theme among selected articles and their business genre.
From the interpreted data, it is also noted that a series of metaphors runs throughout the
corpus. The corpus‟s written discourse is grounded through two conceptual mappings:
ECONOMY AS A PERSON and ECONOMY AS A LIVING ORGANIZM. Collocation
analysis of the last selected keyword, MARKET, within the corpus also reveals another type
of meaning transference- metonymy. The substitution in metonymy here can be of three
types: the concrete used instead of the abstract, the place or event for attendants and
instructions or organizations. Metaphors and metonymy can be considered as some of the
stylistic resources on which reporters of economic affairs depend.
For all things mentioned, the researcher can come to a conclusion that there is a close
connection between the theme of a specialized corpus and the language choice in the articles.
The corpus theme and its business genre influence types of collocates that the keywords take;