A Corpus Based Study on the Colligation of The Time Machine

Abstract

The past 50 years have witnessed huge progress and great evolution in Corpus Linguistics. Corpus Linguistics and colligation have their solid philosophy foundations. Colligation is believed to be the co-occurrence of the node words and abstract grammatical categories; thus, it can be an abstract reflection of certain writing habits in language use. The Time Machine is a famous science fiction written by George Herbert Wells. Through the study of colligation in this science fiction, the author tends to use different writing techniques and typical collocation. The result shows that the attributive clause is widely adopted in the text, followed by the object clause. The flaws of the software CLAWS Tagger are also discovered through the study.