Collocation and Extended Meanings
Collocation can contribute to economic and systematic processing of sig­ nificant linguistic topics, i.e., metaphor, metonymy and anomaly. Genera­ lizing the application as well as the concept of collocation, this paper shows an efficient computational theory of collocation is feasible. An over-all picture of collocation can be captured through a view of col­ location as continuum, e.g., a frozenness eline. Frozenness entails two kinds of expectation: rule-based and use-based expectation. The frozen­ ness continuum is partitioned in terms of a 'collocational space' and partial functions which enable even the composition of meanings of frozen expres­ sions. Derailment from collocational expectation results in anomaly or figura­ tive extension of meanings. Metaphor, a paradigmatic extension of mean­ ing, was treated basically in terms of rule-based approaches. But, dead or frozen metaphors can be efficiently processed in terms of collocational ex­ pectation, in which novel metaphors and anomalies can be distinguished better than in former approaches which were entirely dependant on rules. Metonymy, a syntagmatic extension of meaning, was relatively more ne­ glected than metaphor in linguistic studies. We show an example of calculat­ ing metonymy by the collaboration between default and compositional pro­ cessing, or the cooperation between use-based and rule-based inferences.