British contextualism and a holistic approach to words: an argument for the essence of collocation

• Main Author: Lee, Sung-Il
• Published: University of Nottingham 2008
• Subjects: 121
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.491001

As Carter points out (1995: 22), 'Context is a complex notion because it concerns not only features of the external, non-linguistic environment ... but also the internal, linguistic environment of the text itself.' The present thesis sheds light on a variety of perspectives on context, with a view to characterising the specifically textual features of context as British Contextualism. More concretely, Sinclair's idea of 'co-text', as framed in his Holistic Approach to vocabulary, is scrutinised, and also identified as a characteristic of British Contextualism. In particular, the thesis places strong emphasis on Sinclair's monist viewpoint, and makes an attempt to define it as the very nature of British Contextualism. Further, in detailing Sinclair's idea of a multi-word lexical item, the thesis raises further questions about the essence of collocation, and argues that 'appropriation' binds together collocates in a given co-text.