This dictionary is the result of over 30 years collecting verbal collocations from various sources as can be seen from the references of the examples. When there are no references, they were retrieved from one of Mark Davies´s English and Portuguese corpora.
The dictionary offers no definitions but the examples were chosen so as to make the meaning clear.
It is still a work in progress – dictionaries are never complete! – so there may be entries for which no equivalent or example is provided. Contributions are welcome. If you have any suggestions, please contact me.
for more information see COMET: corpus multilíngue para ensino e tradução
Acknowlegdments
This resource was made available in digital form by Ligeia Lugli thanks to the NEH-funded project Democratizing Digital Lexicography (HAA-290402-23).
Preface
It all started back in 1982, when I attended a summer course by Prof. Charles J. Fillmore named “Conventionality in Language”, at the University of Maryland. I had just finished by Master’s comparing the verbs ‘to do’ and ‘to make’, which was based on his article The case for case (1968).
His course was a turning point in my academic career and gave rise to my PhD dissertation Levels of Conventionality and the Translator’s Task (1987) in which I already pointed out that verbal collocations lacked adequate lexicographic material.
This was confirmed by a survey to investigate how nine English verbal collocations and their Portuguese equivalents were treated in nine standard dictionaries, both monolingual English and bilingual English-Portuguese and in three Brazilian dictionaries, two bilingual and one monolingual. It showed that they did not receive systematic treatment.
Most of them were listed under the verb, only a few under the noun. Although it might be appropriate to list a verbal collocation under the verb in a dictionary aimed at the comprehension of language, it is not so in one aimed at production. Usually, a speaker or writer knows the noun, the referential lexeme, but might not know the verb that goes with it. For that reason, verbal collocations should come under the noun, as Hausmann (1985) has already claimed, for the noun is the base in a verbal collocation. In addition, verbal collocations were rarely listed as an entry in their own right. Mostly, they were either listed as a subentry, or in the definition or still as part of an example, but sometimes not highlighted in any form.
So I made it my goal to produce a bilingual English-Portuguese/Portuguese-English Dictionary of Verbal Collocations aimed at the production of language. I presented a model for an entry in my post-doctorate thesis (Tagnin, 1998).
Put simply, a collocation is the cohesive combination of two or more words that have been conventionalized as a lexical unit. The structures addressed in the dictionary are the following:
V (Det) N~[object]~ – make trouble, make an impression
N~[noun]~ + V – river flows, nose runs
V + Prep + N – come into force, keep in touch
V + Adj – get rich, go wrong
Below I will discuss decisions that had to be made and which will make the notion of collocation clearer.
For instance:
(1) Is this a collocation?
Answer: For a combination to be considered a collocation it must present some type of lexical restriction: give a book is not a collocation because give in this sense means to hand something over to someone and it can combine with any object, such as give a book, give a pencil, give a present, give a dress etc. However, give a paper at a conference has a very specific meaning and is thus considered a collocation.
(2) Is frequency the only criterion for a combination to be considered a collocation?
Answer: Frequency is not always the sole criterion, exclusivity (Brezina, McEnery, & Wattam, 2015, p. 140) is equally relevant. The Portuguese word for doubt, ‘dúvida’, collocates with ‘esclarecer’ (clarify) 2730 times in the Corpus do Português: Web/Dialect (Davies, s.d.) but only 321 with its synonym ‘dirimir’. Nevertheless, DÚVIDA is the most common collocate of DIRIMIR, which qualifies the combination as a collocation. The same may be said for FURL which, though not a frequent verb, combines mostly with some type of sail: Scouts untied lines, furled sails, dropped anchor. I went aloft to furl the mainsail in a blow.
(3) Is this collocation too specialized to be included in a general dictionary?
Answer: This can be a tricky question, but we have decided to only include specialized collocations which are known to the general public or, as the editors of the Oxford Collocations dictionary for students of English have put it, to the “educated non-specialist” (2002, p. ix). So, for instance, score a goal has been included, while jump offside has not. By the same token, everyday legal collocations such as file/settle/dismiss a lawsuit are also listed.
(4) Is this a good example, does it make the meaning clear?
Answer: We have attempted to use examples that make the meaning clear because the dictionary does not include definitions. For instance, Tom, you bring up a point that I brought up a few weeks back does not offer enough context for the user to infer the meaning of bring up a point, whereas While I doubt this is true, it does bring up a point I want to discuss does.
(5) How can we find a good equivalent?
Answer: Finding a good equivalent can be difficult at times for various reasons: the collocation in language A is not translated by a similar collocation in language B. Whereas crash a party is a V + N collocation, its Portuguese equivalent, ‘entrar de penetra numa festa’ is not actually a collocation as we have defined it. Some collocations are translated by a single verb, like go sour whose equivalent is simply ‘azedar’. More often than not nouns are quite different across languages: make arrangements becomes ‘tomar providências’ in Portuguese. In such cases one has to rely on one’s own knowledge of both languages or resort to searches in monolingual or even bilingual parallel corpora (Tagnin, 2007).
(6) Should cognate verbal collocations be included?
Answer: We have opted to include cognate verbal collocations because they may differ in their inclusion or not of a determiner, for instance. Make a difference requires some kind of determiner, while in the Portuguese translation, ‘fazer (uma) diferença’, the determiner is not compulsory.
(7) How do we account for verbal collocations for which the equivalent is not a collocation?
Answer: Because this is a bidirectional dictionary, the verbal collocation will only be listed in the source language, that is, if it is a verbal collocation in English but not in Portuguese, there will be an entry for it in the English-Portuguese direction, but not in the reverse direction. For example, go sour will have an entry in the English-Portuguese direction with its equivalent ‘azedar’, but ‘azedar’ will not be an entry in the other direction as it is not a verbal collocation.
Although the initial idea was to publish the dictionary on paper, it became increasingly clear that with the development of the internet and the cost of paper editions, an online publication would be the only plausible solution.
Therefore, I am very happy to be able to bring to light the first part of the dictionary, that is, the English-Portuguese direction as part of the project NEH-funded project Democratizing Digital Lexicography, coordinated by Dr. Ligeia Lugli. Nevertheless, it is still work in progress – are’t all dictionaries? - as there are collocations for which there are no examples yet. Also, some examples may still be inadequate and will be replaced by better ones.
References
Brezina, V., McEnery, T., & Wattam, S. (2015). Collocations in context - a new perspective on collocation networks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 20:2, pp. 139-173.
Davies, M. (s.d.). Corpus do Português: Web/Dialects. Fonte: https://www.corpusdoportugues.org/: https://www.corpusdoportugues.org/web-dial/
Fillmore, C. J. (1968). The Case for Case. Em E. B. (eds.), Universals in Linguistic Theory (pp. 1-88). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Hausmann, F. J. (1985). Kollokationen im deutschen Wörterbuch - ein Beitrag sur Theorie des lexikographischen Beispiels. Em H. Bergenholtz, & J. Mugdan (Eds.), Lexikographie und Grammatik. Akten des Essener Kolloquiums zur Grammatick im Wörterbuch (pp. 118-129). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Oxford Collocations Dictionary. (2002). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tagnin, S. E. (1987). Levels of Conventionality and the Translator's Task. São Paulo, São Paulo: FFLCH / USP.
Tagnin, S. E. (1998). Convencionalidade e Produção de Texto: um dicionário de colocações verbais inglês-português / português-inglês. Tese de Livre Docência - USP-FFLCH - Departamento de Letras Modernas. São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil.
Tagnin, S. E. (2007). A identificação de equivalentes tradutórios em corpora comporáveis. Anais do I Congresso Internacional da ABRAPUI. Belo Horizonte: UFMG.