Analysing a Type of Collocation: Make Complex Predicates in Nineteenth-Century Science and Fiction

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse the behaviour of a type of collocation formed by a verb plus noun in 19th-century texts. The study will be focused on the verb make when functioning as a collocative or light verb. In order to check if the register or text-type determines in some way the use of these collocations, the corpus used will have two separate parts. The scientific subcorpus will include extracts of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing, and the 19th-century fiction section will be compiled with literary texts taken from the Chadwyck-Healey Collection. As the Chadwyck-Healey Collection is not a corpus but a database, excerpts of some of the novels included there have been selected to compile an appropriate counterpart.