Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Collocation
Collocation
Collocation
net/publication/288152909
Collocations
CITATIONS READS
6 7,736
1 author:
Ramesh Krishnamurthy
SEE PROFILE
Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:
All content following this page was uploaded by Ramesh Krishnamurthy on 23 August 2019.
Abstract
J.R. Firth first gave collocation prominence in linguistic theory. Halliday, Sinclair,
Stubbs, and Hoey have all extended Firth’s ideas. Palmer and Hornby recognised the
pedagogical value of collocation, and incorporated it into their early EFL dictionaries.
More recent EFL dictionaries, based on large computerized language corpora, have
used complex software and statistical measures to gain further insights into the way
that collocational patterns are woven into language, and the results are visible in
the dictionary entries of later editions. This has fed back into language pedagogy, and
Body Text
The fact that certain words co-occurred frequently was noticed in Biblical
concordances (e.g. Cruden listed the occurrences of dry with ground in 1769). Style
and usage guides in the 19th-20th centuries (e.g. Fowler’s The King’s English)
addressed only the overuse of collocations, labelling them clichés, and criticising their
1
2. Collocation in modern Linguistics
In modern linguistics, collocation refers to the fact that certain lexical items tend to
co-occur more frequently in natural language use than syntax and semantics alone
would dictate. Collocation was first given theoretical prominence by J.R. Firth, who
‘abstraction at the syntagmatic level’) and accorded it a distinct status in his account
of the linguistic levels at which meaning can arise. Firth implicitly indicated that
some texts.
Halliday saw collocation as a cohesive device and identified the need for a measure of
significant proximity between collocating items, and said that collocation could only
be discussed in terms of probability, thus validating the need for quantitative analyses
and the use of statistics. Sinclair performed the first computational investigation of
collocation, comparing written and spoken corpora, identifying 5 words as the span
lemmatization.
Halliday and Sinclair thought that collocation could enable a lexical analysis of
2
lexical items have collocations, Hoey accommodates collocation within a model of
‘lexical priming’, and suggests that most sentences are made up of interlocking
1930s, and English collocations were described in detail by Harold Palmer in a report
on phraseology research with A.S. Hornby, using the term fairly loosely to cover
but also used collocations to indicate the relevant senses of words in wordlists (draw
1. e.g., a picture 2. e.g., a line), and in their dictionary examples (a practice continued
Early EFL dictionaries avoided using the term collocation, e.g. OALD 1974 refers to
grammatical way in which the headword is used’ (meantime: in the ~). LDOCE 1978
refers to ‘ways in which English words are used together, whether loosely bound or
occurring in fixed phrases’ and ‘special phrases in which a word is usually (or
always) found’, but also has a section headed ‘Collocations’, defined as ‘a group of
words which are often used together to form a natural-sounding combination’ and
states that they are shown in 3 ways: in example sentences, in explanations in Usage
Notes, or in heavy black type inside round brackets if they are very frequent or almost
a fixed phrase (‘but not an idiom’), signalled by ‘in the phr.’ or similar rubrics, and
3
Later EFL dictionaries (Cobuild, Cambridge, Macmillan, etc) continued to
the Cobuild Dictionary (1987), in the section on ‘Word and Environment’, talks of
‘the way in which the patterns of words with each other are related to the meanings
and uses of the words’ and says that ‘the sense of a word is bound up with a particular
usage… a close association of words or a grouping of words into a set phrase’ and ‘(a
discussing examples such as hard luck, hard facts, hard evidence, strong evidence,
In Sinclair (1987), collocates are defined as ‘words which co-occur significantly with
five words… of the headword’ with a greater frequency than expected, which ‘was
established only on the basis of corpus evidence’. For the first time in lexicography, a
these different senses pinpoint the fact that they are different senses’; ‘Collocation…
metaphorical uses of treadmill and blanket (e.g. …the corporate treadmill; …the
treadmill of office life; a security blanket for new democracies; a blanket of snow).
Collocation is the ‘lexical realisation of the situational context’ (ibid.). In the central
patterns of English, ‘meaning was only created by choosing two or more words
4
simultaneously’ (ibid.). However, the flexibility of collocation (sometimes crossing
particular group of collocates occurs in a structured relationship with the word’ and
therefore ‘there is no suitable pattern ready for use as a vehicle of explanation’ (ibid.).
semantic sets; feet suggests ‘legs, toes, head’ or ‘shoe, sandals, sock’, or ‘walk, run’,
whereas significant corpus collocates of feet are ‘tall, high, long, and numbers’ (ibid.).
Prompted by hint, we produce ‘subtle, small, clue’; the corpus indicates ‘give, take,
open: the most frequent words before open are ‘the, to, an, is, an, wide, was, door,
more, eyes’ and after open are ‘to, and, the, for, up, space, a, it, in, door’ (ibid.).
the difference between electric (collocates: specific devices such as guitar, chair,
light, car, motor, windows, oven, all ‘powered by electricity’), and electrical
5
Subsequent software developments have enabled the automatic measurement of
high-attraction collocates (e.g. dentist with hygienist, optician, and molar) while t-
significant grammatical words (e.g. dentist with a, and your). The software can also
display the collocate’s positional distribution if required, and recursive options are
objects: suit, dress, hat, etc + prepositional phrases (after of: armour, clothing, jeans,
etc; after with: pride, sleeve, collar, etc; after on: sleeve, wrist, finger, etc; after over:
shirt, head, dress, etc); similarly fish is the subject of the verbs swim, catch, fry, etc,
the object of the verbs catch, eat, feed, etc, modified by the adjectives tropical, bony,
collocations, although their judgments affect the both the placement and specific
later used transformations and meaning distinctions as well as surface patterns, and
6
Hunston and Francis (2000) list the linguistic and lexicological terminology that has
routine formulae, phrasemes, etc, and refer to the work of Moon and Melčuk in
However, one of Firth’s original terms, colligation, used to describe the habitual co-
occurrence of grammatical elements, has not achieved the same widespread usage as
and particle (adverb or preposition) to form semantic units, has been highlighted in
EFL dictionaries, and several EFL publishers have produced separate dictionaries of
phrasal verbs.
There have been some dictionaries of collocations, but so far each has had its own
limitations: not wholly corpus-based (e.g. Benson, Benson and Ilson; Hill and Lewis),
based on a small corpus (e.g. Kjellmer), or limited coverage (the recent Oxford
For computational purposes, the relevant features of collocation are that they are
1993), and ‘of limited semantic compositionality’ (Manning and Schutze 1999).
But the greatest interest has been generated in the pedagogic profession, with
numerous conference and journal papers. Lewis’s book (2000) encapsulates the main
7
concerns: students do not recognise collocations in their input, and hence fail to
generalise more easily from corpus concordance examples than from canonical
familiar words (easier than acquiring new words in isolation); longer chunks are more
From many fields, it seems that collocation has a great future. The applications of
collocation in language teaching have been one of the notable recent successes. Its
software. The exact parameters are not fully established, and the statistical measures
initiated in the 1960s (Sinclair et al 1970), but has still not become sufficiently robust
generated thesaurus. The theoretical impetus of collocation has yet to reach the level
that direction.
8
Further Reading
Benson, M., Benson, E. & Ilson, R. (1986). The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of
Church, K.W. & Hanks, P. (1989). ‘Word Association Norms, Mutual Information,
Church, K.W., Gale, W., Hanks, P., & Hindle, D. (1990). ‘Using Statistics in Lexical
Clear, J. (1993). ‘From Firth Principles: Computational Tools for the Study of
Collocation’, in Baker, M., Francis, G., & Tognini-Bonelli, E. (eds.) Text and
Cowie, A.P. (1999). English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners - a History. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Halliday, M.A.K (1966). ‘Lexis as a linguistic level’ in Bazell, C.E., Catford, J.C.,
Longman
9
Hill, J. & Lewis, M. (1997). LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations. Hove: LTP
Kilgarriff, A., Rychly, P., Smrz, P. & Tugwell, D. (2004). ‘The Sketch Engine’, in
Press
Louw, B. (1993). ‘Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic
Kaitakusha
Sinclair, J.M. (1966). ‘Beginning the Study of Lexis’ in Bazell, C.E., Catford, J.C.,
Longman
Sinclair, J.M., Jones, S. & Daley, R. (1970). English Lexical Studies, Report to OSTI
10
collocation studies: the OSTI Report. London: Continuum.
Linguistics 19(1):143-177.
Linguistics22(1):1-38.
A brief biography
Ramesh Krishnamurthy was born in Madras, India, and has degrees in French and
German from Cambridge University, and Sanskrit and Indian Religions from London
11
European linguistics projects, and conducted workshops and courses on corpus
12