collocation
COLLOCATION
Raheleh lotfi azar
Linguistic
Thursdays 10-12
1
Index
What is a collocation?
3
Why learn collocations?
4
How to learn collocations
4
Types of Collocation
5
Collocation Lists
6
General differences among English light verbs
7
Appendix
9
References
18
2
What is a collocation?
A collocation is two or more words that often go together. These combinations just sound
"right" to native English speakers, who use them all the time. On the other hand, other combinations may be unnatural and just sound "wrong". Look at these examples:
Natural English...
Unnatural English...
the fast train fast food
the quick train quick food
a quick shower a quick meal
a fast shower a fast meal
In corpus linguistics, collocation defines a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, collocation is a sub-type of phraseme. An example of a phraseological collocation (from Michael Halliday) is the expression strong tea. While the same meaning could be conveyed by the roughly equivalent
*powerful tea, this expression is considered incorrect by English speakers. Conversely, the corresponding expression for computer, powerful computers is preferred over *strong computers. Phraseological collocations should not be confused with idioms although both are similar in that there is a degree of meaning present in the collocation or idiom that is not entirely compositional. With idioms, the meaning is completely non-compositional whereas collocations are mostly compositional.
The processing of collocations involves a number of parameters, the most important of which is the measure of association, which evaluates whether the co-occurrence is purely by chance or statistically significant. Due to the non-random nature of language, most collocations are classed as significant, and the association scores are simply used to rank the results.
Raheleh lotfi azar
Linguistic
Thursdays 10-12
1
Index
What is a collocation?
3
Why learn collocations?
4
How to learn collocations
4
Types of Collocation
5
Collocation Lists
6
General differences among English light verbs
7
Appendix
9
References
18
2
What is a collocation?
A collocation is two or more words that often go together. These combinations just sound
"right" to native English speakers, who use them all the time. On the other hand, other combinations may be unnatural and just sound "wrong". Look at these examples:
Natural English...
Unnatural English...
the fast train fast food
the quick train quick food
a quick shower a quick meal
a fast shower a fast meal
In corpus linguistics, collocation defines a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, collocation is a sub-type of phraseme. An example of a phraseological collocation (from Michael Halliday) is the expression strong tea. While the same meaning could be conveyed by the roughly equivalent
*powerful tea, this expression is considered incorrect by English speakers. Conversely, the corresponding expression for computer, powerful computers is preferred over *strong computers. Phraseological collocations should not be confused with idioms although both are similar in that there is a degree of meaning present in the collocation or idiom that is not entirely compositional. With idioms, the meaning is completely non-compositional whereas collocations are mostly compositional.
The processing of collocations involves a number of parameters, the most important of which is the measure of association, which evaluates whether the co-occurrence is purely by chance or statistically significant. Due to the non-random nature of language, most collocations are classed as significant, and the association scores are simply used to rank the results.
References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/collocations.htm http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/easy/colloc.htm http://esl.about.com/od/vocabularyreference/a/cl_money.htm http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Collocations_of_do,_have,_make,_and_take Book: Collocations in use, Michael McCarthy Felicity O 'Dell 18