Collocation & Corpus

Linguistics

Agenda

What is Collocation ?
Collocation vs. colligation
Types of collocation in English

What is Corpus Linguistics?

What does CL have to do with collocation ?

Examples

Collocation
The idea of collocation was first introduced by J. R.
Firth in 1957.
You shall know a word by the company it keeps!
Collocation is the statistically significant tendency for
two or more words to co-occur together.

the habitual association of a word in a language with

other particular words in sentences. ( Robins,2000,P.64)
And this appears to have arisen arbitrarily in the course
of language evolution.

The arbitrary nature of collections

between near synonyms

Strong
wind

Heavy
wind

Heavy
rain

Strong
rain

Strong
tea

Powerf
ul tea

Collocation \ Colligation
A distinction is often made between colligation and
collocation.
Colligation concerns the grammatical patterns
required by certain words or types of words while
collocation focuses on lexical items repeatedly cooccurring in company in the frame of certain
grammatical patterns.

For example, the verb enjoy can be used in V+

Doing and V + Noun patterns

Types of Collocation in English

Lexical

Collocations Adopted from Benson et al. (1986)

verb + noun
compose music; make an impression;
verb +noun
revoke a license; demolish a house
adjective + noun
strong tea; a rough estimate
noun + verb
bees buzz; bombs explode
noun1 of noun2
pack of dogs; a herd of buffalo
adjective + adverb/ adverb + adjective
sound asleep; hopelessly addicted
verb

+ adverb

argue

heatedly

Now !
Corpus Linguistics

The Term corpus first appeared in the early 1980s.

There are many ways to define a corpus , but there are
a growing consensus that a corpus is a collection of
machine readable authentic texts or transcripts
which is sampled to be a representative of a particular
language or language variety.

CL

It is debatable whether CL is a methodology or a

branch of linguistics.

CL can be considered as a methodology with a wide

range of applications across many areas and theories of
linguistics.

CL & Collocation

Corpora give a very good insight into collocations.

Corpora show us the preferred way of putting things

and thus provide an insight into native-like selection.

CL & Collocation

The concordancer can do more than just list the

examples randomly. The programs WordSmith Tools or
AntConc, for example, can re-sort the context (either to
the left or to the right of the node) so that it is possible
to look for patterns and regularities in the use of a
certain word.