Incorporating Frequency Information in a Collocation Dictionary: Establishing a Methodology

This paper describes the methodology applied to incorporate frequency information in the Diccionario de Colocaciones del Español, a dictionary developed within the framework of Explanatory and Combinatorial Lexicology. The main reasons for including lexical frequency information in DiCE were to enrich the dictionary content with information potentially useful for language learners, and to filter currently listed collocates. Obtaining and providing frequency information on collocations is not a straightforward task. In our case, we have opted for assigning a frequency score to each individual lexical unit which constitutes the base of a collocation, while collocations are assigned a frequency score taking into account both the absolute frequency of the collocation itself and the frequency of the lexical unit constituting its base. As a result, collocates are presented in the dictionary under the lexical entry of the base organized according to their syntactic pattern and their meaning, and ordered according to their frequency. Through assigning frequency scores to collocations we also foresee obtaining a frequency list of all collocations included in DiCE, valuable for language teaching and testing purposes.