In corpus linguistics, a collocation is 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, as propounded by 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, where meaning is derived,
whereas collocations are mostly compositional.
There are about six main types of collocations: adjective+noun, noun+noun, verb+noun, adverb+adjective,
verbs+prepositional phrase, and verb+adverb.
Collocation extraction is a task that extracts collocations automatically from a corpus,
using computational linguistics.
Expanded definition Collocations are partly or fully fixed expressions
that become established through repeated context-dependent use.
Such terms as 'crystal clear', 'middle management', 'nuclear family', and 'cosmetic surgery' are
examples of collocated pairs of words.
Collocations can be in a syntactic relation, lexical relation, 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 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: cooccurrence, a statistical view, which sees collocation
as the recurrent appearance in a text of a node and its collocates, 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 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’
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 language.
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 collocations.
There are also a number of specialized dictionaries devoted to describing the frequent collocations
in a language.
These include Redes: Diccionario combinatorio del español contemporaneo, and the LTP Dictionary
of Selected Collocations and the Macmillan Collocations Dictionary.
See also
Agreement Cliché
Collocational restriction Collostructional analysis
Compound noun, adjective and verb Government
Lexical item N-gram
Phrasal verb Phraseology
Phraseme Siamese twins
References
External links A Small System Storing Spanish Collocations
Morphological characterization of collocations and semantic relationships in Spanish