Word Templates

A string of elements that hover around a word, consisting typically of the word's collocation plus its other syntactic and lexical components clustered into semantic sets. While they are arranged in syntactic order, they are not grammatized. For example, the word template of scholarship is:

a scholarship is awarded [by an institution] to a [student] to study [a subject/skill] [somewhere]

Word templates are limited to nouns and verbs. This pedagogical term has linguistic compatriots in hybrid n-grams and collostructions and is most closely related to the patterns of Hanks' verbs (see the article at the bottom of this page), and to Hunston and Francis (2000:247) who argue that “a pattern is a description of the behaviour of a lexical item“. They add: “the patterns of a word can be defined as all the words and structures which are regularly associated with the word and which contribute to its meaning".