Collocation
Encyclopedia
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 idiom
s 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.
Collocation extraction
is a task that extracts collocations automatically from a corpus, using computational linguistics
.
s, that is adding the degree, or magnifying the impact of the adjectives (sophisticated, happy), However, they are not interchangeable. Still, other adverbs, such as very can replace both highly and extremely.
tically, the words become 'glued' together in our minds. 'Crystal clear', 'middle management', 'nuclear family', and 'cosmetic surgery' are examples of collocated pairs of words. Some words are often found together because they make up a compound noun, for example 'riding boots' or 'motor cyclist'.
Collocations can be in a syntactic
relation (such as verb–object: 'make' and 'decision'), lexical relation (such as antonymy), or they can be in no linguistically defined relation. Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent use of a language: a grammatically
correct sentence will stand out as 'awkward' if collocational preferences are violated. This makes collocation an interesting area for language teaching.
Corpus Linguists specify a Key Word
in Context (KWIC) and identify the words immediately surrounding them. This gives an idea of the way words are used.
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. Commonly used measures of association include mutual information
, t scores
, and log-likelihood.
Rather than select a single definition, Gledhill proposes that collocation involves at least three different perspectives: (i) cooccurrence, a statistical view, which sees collocation as the recurrent appearance in a text of a node and its collocates, (ii) construction, which sees collocation either as a correlation between a lexeme and a lexical-grammatical pattern, or as a relation between a base and its collocative partners and (iii) expression, a pragmatic view of collocation as a conventional unit of expression, regardless of form. It should be pointed out here that these different perspectives contrast with the usual way of presenting collocation in phraseological studies. Traditionally speaking, collocation is explained in terms of all three perspectives at once, in a continuum:
. Thus from the 1940s onwards, information about recurrent word combinations became a standard feature of monolingual learner's dictionaries
. As these dictionaries became 'less word-centred and more phrase-centred', more attention was paid to collocation. This trend was supported, from the beginning of the 21st century, by the availability of large text corpora
and intelligent corpus-querying software, making possible a more systematic account of collocation in dictionaries. Using these tools, dictionaries such as the Macmillan English Dictionary
and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English included boxes or panels with lists of frequent collocationshttp://www.macmillandictionaries.com/about/med/key-features-of-the-macmillan-english-dictionary-second-edition/#7.
There are also a number of specialized dictionaries
devoted to describing the frequent collocations in a language. These include (for Spanish) Redes: Diccionario combinatorio del espanol contemporaneo (2004), and (for English) the LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations (1997) and the Macmillan Collocations Dictionary (2010)http://www.macmillandictionaries.com/features/how-dictionaries-are-written/macmillan-collocations-dictionary/.
Corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely...
, collocation defines a sequence of words or terms
Terminology
Terminology is the study of terms and their use. Terms are words and compound words that in specific contexts are given specific meanings, meanings that may deviate from the meaning the same words have in other contexts and in everyday language. The discipline Terminology studies among other...
that co-occur
Co-occurrence
Co-occurrence or cooccurrence can either mean concurrence / coincidence or, in a more specific sense, the above-chance frequent occurrence of two terms from a text corpus alongside each other in a certain order. Co-occurrence in this linguistic sense can be interpreted as an indicator of semantic...
more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology
Phraseology
In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units , in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than or otherwise not predictable from the sum of their meanings when...
, collocation is a sub-type of phraseme. An example of a phraseological collocation (from Michael Halliday
Michael Halliday
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is a British linguist who developed an internationally influential model of language, the systemic functional linguistic model. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar .-Biography:Halliday was born and raised in England...
)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 idiom
Idiom
Idiom is an expression, word, or phrase that has a figurative meaning that is comprehended in regard to a common use of that expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made...
s 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.
Collocation extraction
Collocation extraction
Collocation extraction is the task of extracting collocations automatically from a corpus using a computer.Within the area of corpus linguistics, collocation is defined as a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. 'Crystal clear', 'middle management',...
is a task that extracts collocations automatically from a corpus, using computational linguistics
Computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....
.
Arbitrary restriction on the substitution of the elements of a collocation
We can say highly sophisticated, and we can say extremely happy. Both adverbs have the same lexical functionLexical function
A lexical function is a tool developed within Meaning-Text Theory for the description and systematization of semantic relationships, specifically collocations and lexical derivation, between particular lexical units of a language...
s, that is adding the degree, or magnifying the impact of the adjectives (sophisticated, happy), However, they are not interchangeable. Still, other adverbs, such as very can replace both highly and extremely.
Syntactic modifiability
Unlike the majority of idioms, collocations are subject to syntactic modification. For example, we can say effective writing and write effectively.Expanded definition
If the expression is heard often, transmitting itself memeMeme
A meme is "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena...
tically, the words become 'glued' together in our minds. 'Crystal clear', 'middle management', 'nuclear family', and 'cosmetic surgery' are examples of collocated pairs of words. Some words are often found together because they make up a compound noun, for example 'riding boots' or 'motor cyclist'.
Collocations can be in a syntactic
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
relation (such as verb–object: 'make' and 'decision'), lexical relation (such as antonymy), or they can be in no linguistically defined relation. Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent use of a language: a grammatically
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
correct sentence will stand out as 'awkward' if collocational preferences are violated. This makes collocation an interesting area for language teaching.
Corpus Linguists specify a Key Word
Keyword (linguistics)
In corpus linguistics a key word is a word which occurs in a text more often than we would expect to occur by chance alone. Key words are calculated by carrying out a statistical test which compares the word frequencies in a text against their expected frequencies derived in a much larger corpus,...
in Context (KWIC) and identify the words immediately surrounding them. This gives an idea of the way words are used.
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
Co-occurrence
Co-occurrence or cooccurrence can either mean concurrence / coincidence or, in a more specific sense, the above-chance frequent occurrence of two terms from a text corpus alongside each other in a certain order. Co-occurrence in this linguistic sense can be interpreted as an indicator of semantic...
is purely by chance or statistically significant
Statistical significance
In statistics, a result is called statistically significant if it is unlikely to have occurred by chance. The phrase test of significance was coined by Ronald Fisher....
. 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. Commonly used measures of association include mutual information
Mutual information
In probability theory and information theory, the mutual information of two random variables is a quantity that measures the mutual dependence of the two random variables...
, t scores
Student's t-test
A t-test is any statistical hypothesis test in which the test statistic follows a Student's t distribution if the null hypothesis is supported. It is most commonly applied when the test statistic would follow a normal distribution if the value of a scaling term in the test statistic were known...
, and log-likelihood.
Rather than select a single definition, Gledhill proposes that collocation involves at least three different perspectives: (i) cooccurrence, a statistical view, which sees collocation as the recurrent appearance in a text of a node and its collocates, (ii) construction, which sees collocation either as a correlation between a lexeme and a lexical-grammatical pattern, or as a relation between a base and its collocative partners and (iii) expression, a pragmatic view of collocation as a conventional unit of expression, regardless of form. It should be pointed out here that these different perspectives contrast with the usual way of presenting collocation in phraseological studies. Traditionally speaking, collocation is explained in terms of all three perspectives at once, in a continuum:
- ‘Free Combination’ ↔ ‘Bound Collocation’ ↔ ‘Frozen Idiom’
Collocation in dictionaries
As long ago as 1933, Harold Palmer's Second Interim Report on English Collocations highlighted the importance of collocation as a key to producing natural-sounding language, for anyone learning a foreign languageForeign language
A foreign language is a language indigenous to another country. It is also a language not spoken in the native country of the person referred to, i.e. an English speaker living in Japan can say that Japanese is a foreign language to him or her...
. Thus from the 1940s onwards, information about recurrent word combinations became a standard feature of monolingual learner's dictionaries
Monolingual learner's dictionary
A Monolingual learner's dictionary is a type of dictionary designed to meet the reference needs of people learning a foreign language...
. As these dictionaries became 'less word-centred and more phrase-centred', more attention was paid to collocation. This trend was supported, from the beginning of the 21st century, by the availability of large text corpora
Corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely...
and intelligent corpus-querying software, making possible a more systematic account of collocation in dictionaries. Using these tools, dictionaries such as the Macmillan English Dictionary
Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners
Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, also known as MEDAL, was first published in 2002 by Macmillan Education. MEDAL is an advanced learner’s dictionary and shares most of the features of this type of dictionary: it provides definitions in simple language, using a controlled defining...
and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English included boxes or panels with lists of frequent collocationshttp://www.macmillandictionaries.com/about/med/key-features-of-the-macmillan-english-dictionary-second-edition/#7.
There are also a number of specialized dictionaries
Specialized dictionary
A specialized dictionary is a dictionary that covers a relatively restricted set of phenomena. The definitive book on the subject includes chapters on dictionaries of:*synonyms*pronunciations*names...
devoted to describing the frequent collocations in a language. These include (for Spanish) Redes: Diccionario combinatorio del espanol contemporaneo (2004), and (for English) the LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations (1997) and the Macmillan Collocations Dictionary (2010)http://www.macmillandictionaries.com/features/how-dictionaries-are-written/macmillan-collocations-dictionary/.
See also
- Agreement (linguistics)Agreement (linguistics)In languages, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates....
- ClichéClichéA cliché or cliche is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning,...
- Collocational restrictionCollocational restrictionCollocational restriction is a linguistic term used in morphology. The term refers to the fact that in certain two-word phrases the meaning of an individual word is restricted to that particular phrase...
- Collostructional analysisCollostructional analysisCollostructional analysis is a family of methods developed by Stefan Th. Gries and...
- Compound noun, adjective and verb
- Government (linguistics)
- Lexical itemLexical itemA Lexical item is a single word or chain of words that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon . Examples are "cat", "traffic light", "take care of", "by-the-way", and "it's raining cats and dogs"...
- N-gramN-gramIn the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sequence of text or speech. The items in question can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or base pairs according to the application...
- Phrasal verbPhrasal verbA phrasal verb is a combination of a verb and a preposition, a verb and an adverb, or a verb with both an adverb and a preposition, any of which are part of the syntax of the sentence, and so are a complete semantic unit. Sentences may contain direct and indirect objects in addition to the phrasal...
- PhraseologyPhraseologyIn linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units , in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than or otherwise not predictable from the sum of their meanings when...
- Phraseme
- Siamese twins (English language)Siamese twins (English language)Siamese twins in the context of the English language refers to a pair or grouping of words that is used together as an idiomatic expression or collocation, usually conjoined by the words and or or. The order of elements cannot be reversed...
External links
- Ozdic - the Collocation Dictionary Online
- Find Collocations from any text any time.
- What is collocation
- A Small System Storing Spanish Collocations (Igor A. Bolshakov & Sabino Miranda-Jiménez)
- Morphological characterization of collocations and semantic relationships in Spanish (Sabino Miranda-Jiménez & Igor A. Bolshakov)