Abstract
This chapter explores the etymology, definition, frequency and collocation patterns of the lexical item war by comparison with the lexical item violence. It shows war to be a highly frequent lexical item (e.g. it is in the top 500 most frequent lexical items in English, ranking higher than words such as food, mother, and work when raw frequencies are compared, and higher than words such as food, human and love when using lemmatised items), lexically prolific (it has nearly 250 compound forms), registerially dispersed, and semantically positive both in its denotative meanings and its typical collocations. By contrast, the word violence has a lower frequency, has no compound forms, is less dispersed, and is negative both in denotative meanings and typical collocations. The chapter also shows these two lexical items to repel each other. While they display a collocational relation, war has a stronger connection to the word peace than to the word violence. The probability that, in a text with the word war, there is a collocation relation to the word peace versus the word violence is 5–1.
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens ... a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build ... a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3
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Notes
- 1.
Fontaine (2017) has drawn the happy analogy between the word and the TARDIS of Dr. Who fame, not only because it travels in space and time, but also because it is “bigger on the inside”.
- 2.
Saussure acknowledged the possible exception to his claim of very rare words, giving examples such as aluminium and eucalyptus (de Saussure 2006, 52).
- 3.
This term is problematic, as all use of language is a realisation of its context of situation (see Chap. 3). Here the term is used to differentiate discourse via a spoken channel other than naturally occurring conversation.
- 4.
For further details of the corpus composition, see natcorp.ox.ac.uk
- 5.
Note that Google’s ngram viewer requires a minimum of 40 instances for a result to be returned.
- 6.
With thanks to Associate Professor Rosemary Huisman for this translation.
- 7.
“Const.” is an OED abbreviation meaning “construction” or “construe with”
- 8.
At the peak of 1941, fought and died is 0.000022% and fought and killed is 0.000002 a ratio of 11–1. At 2000, this ratio is just over 5–1.
- 9.
“Normalised frequency” is a standard measure in corpus linguistics , which allows comparison across corpora of different sizes. A typical NF is a frequency per million words, which I have adopted here.
- 10.
The Lampeter Corpus consists of a decade by decade set of texts collected under the following categories: religion, politics, economy, science, law, and miscellaneous. See https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/sections/linguist/real/independent/lampeter/ lamphome.htm.
- 11.
The Corpus of Contemporary American English consists of texts from various “genres” of spoken discourse (transcripts of unscripted conversation from radio and TV), fiction, popular magazines, newspapers and academic journals. Although it contains spoken discourse, it lacks any discourse from natural casual conversation.
- 12.
Brezina and Gablasova used three principles of selection for this list: frequency, dispersion, and distribution across language corpora. These measures, they argue, “guarantee that the words selected for the new vocabulary list are frequently used in a large number of texts and that the wordlist is compiled in a transparent and replicable way” (Brezina and Gablasova 2013, 3).
- 13.
The use of both whole texts and of text extracts in the BNC makes it problematic to draw firm conclusions about the dispersal of a lexical item across distinct contexts of situation.
- 14.
However, Bartsch and Evert argue in a recent paper that there have been no studies based on a Firthian view: “there has not, to our knowledge, been any systematic large-scale study resting on a Firthian notion of collocation. Studies typically take as their vantage point specific types of multi-word expressions (such as support verb constructions or verb-particle constructions...) or rely completely on intuitions of annotators (e.g. lexicographers’ judgements )” (Bartsch and Evert 2014, 50).
- 15.
How collocational graphs demonstrate “semantic structure ” is not made entirely clear by Brezina et al. 2015.
- 16.
I note Kilgariff’s claim that “the problem for empirical linguistics is that language is not random, so the null hypothesis is never true”. However, “probability models have been responsible for a large share of progress in the field in the last decade and a half. The randomness assumptions are always untrue, but this does not preclude them from being useful ” (Kilgariff 2005, 264).
- 17.
This MI3 value is used as it is the default value for MI3 used in GraphColl (Brezina et al. 2015).
- 18.
For this list, collocates of punctuation were removed (including enclitic ‘s), as well as some function words (e.g. conjunctions, deictics).
- 19.
- 20.
I draw on the translation published online by The Aquinas Institute (see http://theaquinasinstitute.org/about/), and available online: http://aquinas.cc/
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Lukin, A. (2019). War and Violence: Etymology, Definitions, Frequencies, Collocations. In: War and Its Ideologies. The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0996-0_4
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