Towards Corpus Pattern Analysis for Nouns

Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA) is a technique for mapping meaning onto words in text. It was first proposed by Patrick Hanks in 2004 and has since been applied to detect and analyse recurrent syntagmatic patterns centred around verbs across various languages. In this paper, following a suggestion by Hanks himself (Hanks 2004a, 2004b, 2012, 2013), we explore the possibility of applying it to patterns centred around nouns. We conduct an exploratory study of three Spanish nouns with the goal of identifying their most recurrent patterns. Results show that: i. the current CPA apparatus can be successfully used to identify noun patterns, but it requires adjustments and extensions, particularly, the construction of a new ontology for verbs and adjectives; ii. in contrast to verbs, nouns can have more than one pattern per meaning, especially in the case of literal senses, and their meaning may be assigned by collocates that are outside their pattern; iii. metaphorical patterns show more syntactico-semantic restrictions, which may be useful for establishing links between metaphors and language.