N-grams in comparable specialized corpora. Perspectives on phraseology, translation and pedagogy

This paper investigates the idiom principle realized as four-word phrases (4-grams) headed by prepositions in specialized corpora in English and Ital- ian. Concentrating on at the end of, it reports that the collocates of at the end of regard time, and that apparently synonymic 4-grams are not used in the same contexts. It then explores realizations of at the end of in a specialized comparable corpus of Italian. Two findings emerge: firstly, that the most obvious equivalent, alla fine d*, occurs more frequently than in the English corpus; secondly, this n-gram is frequently used, but has weaker collocational relations, and several synonymic 3-grams share its collocates. This invites contrastive research on lexical variation and repetition and on the strength of collocations of multi- word units in English and Italian. Lastly, the paper recounts an experiment with students who gained awareness of language by concentrating on phraseology in comparable corpora.