MODULE 2

Meaning and discourse in English

COLLOCATION
Lecture 4

Why do you say deep water

and not profound water?

A word is known by the company it keeps

(JR Firth)

- tremble with fear

tremble with excitement*
- quiver with excitement
quiver with fear*
There is no definable reason why we choose to say
tremble with fear but not quiver with fear. It is
simply a question of COLLOCATION.

What is collocation?

COLLOCATION refers to a relationship between words that frequently occur

together
The words together can mean more than the sum of their parts (The Times
of India, disk drive)
- other examples: hot dog, mother in law
Examples of collocations
noun phrases like strong tea and weapons of mass destruction
phrasal verbs like to make up, and other phrases like the rich and
powerful.
Valid or invalid?
a stiff breeze but not a stiff wind (while either a strong breeze or a strong
wind is okay).
Broad/bright daylight (but not narrow darkness).

Collocational meaning (1)

Collocational meaning refers to the

associations that a word acquires in its
collocation:

e.g.

pretty

girl
boy
woman
flower
garden
colour
village

boy
man

handsome

car
overcoat

Collocational meaning (2)

A word can gain different collocational meaning in

different contexts:

e.g.

green on the job

green fruit
green with envy

white man
white wine
white noise
white coffee

These different meanings of green and whiteare

polysemous but they are caused by the different
collocation, i.e. the change in verbal context

Criteria for collocations

Typical criteria for collocations:

- non-compositionality
- non-substitutability
- non-modifiability.

Collocations usually cannot be translated into

other languages word by word.

A phrase can be a collocation even if it is not

consecutive (as in the example knock . . . door).

Non-compositionality

A phrase is compositional if the meaning can predicted from

the meaning of the parts.
e.g. new companies
A phrase is non-compositional if the meaning cannot be
predicted from the meaning of the parts
e.g. hot dog
Collocations are not necessarily fully compositional in that
there is usually an element of meaning added to the
combination. e.g. strong tea.
Idioms are the most extreme examples of noncompositionality. e.g. to hear it through the grapevine.

Non-substitutability

We cannot substitute near-synonyms for the

components of a collocation.
e.g. We cant say yellow wine instead of white wine even
though yellow is as good a description of the color of
white wine as white is (it is kind of a yellowish white).

Many collocations cannot be freely modified with

additional lexical material or through grammatical
transformations (Non-modifiability).

e.g. white wine, but not whiter wine

mother in law, but not mother in laws

Linguistic Subclasses of
Collocations

Light verbs:
- Verbs with little semantic content like make, take and
do.
- e.g. make lunch, take it easy,

Verb particle constructions

- e.g. to go down

Proper nouns
- e.g. Bill Clinton

Terminological expressions refer to concepts and

objects in technical domains.
- e.g. Hydraulic oil filter

Collocations at a distance

Many collocations occur at variable

distances. For example knock
collocates with door but at a distance
- she knocked on his door
- they knocked at the door
- 100 women knocked on Donaldsons door
- a man knocked on the metal front door

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Finding collocations

Software is able to scan texts for the

most frequently collocated words using
the criterion of frequency, i.e. by
counting the words which most
frequently appear together
This usually produces a lot of function
words which need to be filtered out

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An example of a frequency
count

This shows the most

frequent collocations
of pairs of words
(bigrams) in a
corpus of
newspaper articles.
The are all function
words (except New
York)

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Frequency count after filtering

This chart shows the
most frequent collocations
after filtering out the
function words. The
capital letters refer to the
part of speech
(A = Adjective, N = Noun)

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Idioms - characteristics (1)

Idioms are strictly non-compositional
Although the word that make up the idiom have
Their own literal meanings, in the idiom they
have lost their individual identity. You canot
predict the meaning of an idiom from the sum of
its parts:
e.g. how do you do?

Im under the weather

to wear your heart on your sleeve
red herring

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Idioms - characteristics (2)

Structural stability (syntactic frozenness)

1. Constituents cannot be replaced

e.g. as good as gold / as good as play ?
2. Constituents cannot be deleted or added to
e.g. out of the question / out of question ?

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In which areas of language

learning is collocation useful?
Collocation is important at all levels for
Writing
Translation
You will only be able to write well if you
know which words go together.

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How do I learn collocations?

Noticing collocations when you read

Storing collocations: organised lexical

notebook

Revising and practicing collocations

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Which collocations should I

learn?

Unique collocations (foot the bill, shrug your shoulders)

Strong collocations (ulterior motives, rancid butter,
trenchant criticism, to be moved to tears)
Medium collocations (to make a mistake, to be recovering
from a major operation)
Weak collocations (white wine, red hair, a black mood, a
blue movie)

It is best to learn the strong collocations

because they are unusual

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Note down your collocation

mistakes

Collocation is mostly about pairings of

words so students will often use a miscollocation, e.g. high house

You should record your written miscollocations

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Learn extra collocations

Note down the extra collocations you learn

in class:

e.g. S: I have to make an exam

T: what verb do we use with exam?
S: take
T: thats right; other verbs we could use
are to pass, to fail or also to
retake

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Try to extend what you know

Even when you get something right you
can extend your collocational
knowledge
e.g. S: I was very disappointed
T: You could also say bitterly or
deeply disappointed

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Finding collocations in a text

Underline useful collocations and put

them in your notebooks

Read different types of text so you build

up your mental lexicons in a balanced
way

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Some typical collocation

exercises

Synonyms: identify words appearing

frequently in similar contexts
Blast victims were helped by the neighbours
Flu victims were helped by the doctors
Crime victims were helped by the police

Collocations: identify synonyms that dont

appear in similar contexts
Flu victims, flu sufferers
Crime victims, crime sufferers??

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Record and recycle

Always write down new collocations in

special notebooks in a systematic order
such as recording them in topic groups.

It is important to repeat the content of

the notebook in order to acquire it fully
(recycling)

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Use special notebooks for

collocation

Prepare a special lexicon for collocations. It is

helpful to organise it like this:
attract

- do not record more

than five collocates

besubjectto
criticism

deserve

- use only strong,

frequent collocates

reactto

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Learning idioms

Since collocations and idioms have a lot

in common they should be learned in a
similar way

e.g. identifying of idioms, guessing

meaning from context, recording them
in notebooks

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Dictionaries

The LTP Dictionary of Selected

Collocations
Oxford Collocations Dictionary for
Students of English
Cambridge International Dictionary of
Idioms
Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Idioms
Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms

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Concordancing software

Tapor freeware (this will give you

concordances of any word in a text)

Wordsmith Tools (excellent but

expensive)

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