phraseological units found in typical poetical texts

What is it about?

This paper looks at a corpus of British and US poetry, uncovering phraseological units which, through their frequency, are indicators of key con- cepts. Multi-word units (MWUs) have been discussed extensively with reference to corpus-based research, for example by Sinclair (1996) [2004], Biber and Conrad (1999), or, referred to as formulaicity by Wray (2002); O’Keefe et al. (2007), Greaves and Warren (2010) and Pace-Sigge (2015) describe MWUs preferred in different spoken and written genres. So far, however, there has been very little research in how far MWUs appear in the sub-genre of imaginative writing, namely, poetry. A commonly held view is that poetry by definition should not be yielding patterns- it subverts every pattern linguistically speaking that it can. Through focus on the main themes surfacing in multiword units, this research looks at usages found in poetic texts in-depth and compares sets of words found with their occurrence patterns in prose literature.

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