Collocations ‫اإلنتظام اللغوي‬

What is a collocation?

According to Firth (1968), 'You shall know a word by the company it keeps'.

)‫(يمكنك معرفة معنى الكلمة عن طريق الكلمات المصاحبة لها‬

It is obvious that by looking at the linguistic context of words we can often distinguish between
different meanings of a certain word. For example, Nida (1964) discussed the use of the word
chair in:

 Sat in a chair ‫جلس على الكرسي‬

 The baby's high chair
 The chair of philosophy
 Has accepted a University chair ‫مقعد دراسي‬
 The chairman of the meeting ‫رئيس الجلسة‬
 Will chair the meeting ‫يترأس اإلجتماع‬
 The electric chair ‫كرسي كهربائي‬
 Condemned to the chair

So, collocation is important in interpreting the meaning of a word that has multi meanings.

The two adjectives strong and powerful might seem to have similar meaning and sometimes
they are used with some items like ‘strong argument’ and ‘powerful argument’.

Nevertheless, there are collocation effects. For example, we talk of ‘strong tea’ rather than
‘powerful tea’; but ‘a powerful car’ rather than ‘a strong car’. Such collocation can undergo a
fossilization process until they become fixed expressions.

Other examples, we say:

 ‘a herd of cattle’, but ‘a pack of dogs’

 ‘hot and cold water’ rather than ‘cold and hot water’
 They are ‘husband and wife’ rather than ‘wife and husband’
 Salt and vinegar
 Fish and chips

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Although the milk is white, we cannot say 'white milk', but we can say 'white paint'.

We always say 'blond hair' but we cannot say 'blond door' or 'blond dress' even if the colour
were exactly that of blond hair.

The adjective 'rancid' (‫ )فاسد‬occurs only with 'bacon' (‫ )لحم الخنزير‬and 'butter' (‫ )الزبد‬and the
adjective 'addled' (‫ )فاسد‬with 'brains' and 'eggs' in spite of the fact that English has the terms
'rotten', and 'bad' and that 'milk' never collocates with 'rancid' but only with 'sour' ( - ‫حامض‬
‫)فاسد‬.

The expressions 'pretty child' (‫ )طفلة جميلة‬and 'buxom neighbour' (‫ )الجارة الممتلئة الجسم‬would
normally refer to females. We should note that we cannot say 'pretty boy' or 'buxom man'.

Flock of sheep herd of cows school of whale pride of lions

(The only difference between 'herd' and 'flock' is that one is used with 'cows' and the other is
used with 'sheep')

In these expressions, the four words (flock, herd, school, and pride) have the same meaning
(one word) in Arabic (‫)قطيع‬.

Chattering of magpies exaltation of larks

Dog/bark cat/mew sheep/bleat horse/neigh

Though we may say 'The rhododendron died', we shall not say 'The rhododendron passed away'
Although the word 'pass away' seem to mean 'die'.

In this case, the verb 'pass away' does not indicate a special kind of dying but there is a
restriction on its use with a group of words that are semantically related.