The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the presence and role of
prefabricated language in Greek and English with the aid of corpora of authentic
texts. Prefabricated language is approached through the examination of the
lexical clusters that appear in two different corpora, one for each language.
The two corpora used for the purposes of the dissertation are the BNC
Baby for English and the Concise CGT for Greek. Four sub-corpora for each
language of 1.000.000 words each were distinguished, namely: Spoken texts,
Academic texts, Newspapers and Fiction. With the aid of special software all
lexical clusters have been identified. The first 100 in frequency clusters from
each sub-corpus and cluster size were selected and then pruned for
inconsistencies and errors; thus, 912 clusters for Greek and 1.032 for English
with cluster size ranging from 3 to 7 words form the core object of analysis in the
present study.
Four different types of clusters were identified, namely basic, extended,
variant and unique clusters. The different functions the lexical clusters perform in
the text they appear permits their categorisation into seven categories, i.e.
stance, referential, text organizing, title, personal, grammatical and thematic
clusters.
The contrastive analysis of the two corpora has indicated that the two
languages differ with respect to the presence, number and frequency of lexical
clusters, mainly because of typological and syntactic differences between them
such as word endings in Greek and passive voice construction in English. Most
lexical clusters in both languages appear in Spoken texts, although English has
more than double the Greek clusters in this text type. The seven cluster
categories are common in the two languages, with referential and stance clusters
outnumbering by far the others. Finally, there are only few instances where a
cluster in one language has a word for word correspondence with a cluster in the
other, retaining the same function. In addition, a few lexical clusters are
prominent in one language and do not appear in the other.
The dissertation has significant implications for further research into lexical
clusters and prefabricated language, in general, with regard to Greek. This study
can lead to a better understanding of how language works and can contribute,
among else, to teaching Greek to native and foreign learners and English to
Greek native speakers.
National Documentation Centre (EKT)
