Collocation

This article is about the corpus linguistics notion. For other uses, see Colocation (disambiguation).

English grammar
Abbreviations Acronyms Adjectives Adjunct Adverbs Argument (linguistics) Augmentative Causative Clauses (in English) Collocation (in English) Comma Complementizer Conjunctions Copula (linguistics) Definiteness Demonstrative Determiner Diminutive (in Australian English) Double negatives English articles Compounds Conditionals Determiners English honorifics English orthography English phonology Plurals Possessives English prefix Verbs Auxiliaries, contractions Irregular verbs Modal verbs deduction habits and past facts Passive voice Phrasal verbs Compound verbs Subjunctive Verb usage Expletive Frequentative Grammatical gender Grammatical aspect Grammatical case Grammatical conjugation Modifier Grammatical mood Grammatical number Grammatical person Grammatical voice Great Vowel Shift Hyphen Hypocorism Idiom (in English) Intensifier Intensive word form Interjections Interrogative word Interrogative Negation Noun class Nouns Periphrasis Phrases Portmanteau Predicate Prefix Prepositions Pronouns Specificity Style (manner of address) Inversion Suffix Vowel length Grammar disputes

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 excessive and awkward by English speakers. Conversely, the corresponding expression in technology, powerful computer is preferred over strong computer. Phraseological collocations should not be confused with idioms, where an idiom's meaning is derived from its convention as a stand-in for something else while collocation is a mere popular composition. The ability to use english effectively involves an awareness of a distinctive feature of the language known as collocation. Collocation is that behaviour of the language by which two or more words go together, in speech or writing.

There are about six main types of collocations: adjective+noun, noun+noun (such as collective nouns), verb+noun, adverb+adjective, verbs+prepositional phrase (phrasal verbs), and verb+adverb.

Collocation extraction is a computational technique that finds collocations in a document or corpus, using various computational linguistics elements resembling data mining.

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 (such as verb–object: 'make' and 'decision'), lexical relation (such as antonymy), 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. Recently, a mobile version of Collocation Dictionary was published on Google Play.

Corpus linguists specify a key word in context (KWIC) 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: (i) co-occurrence, a statistical view, which sees collocation as the recurrent appearance in a text of a node and its collocates, (ii) 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 (iii) 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

In 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 to provide 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 (for Spanish) Redes: Diccionario combinatorio del español contemporaneo (2004), (for French) Le Robert: Dictionnaire des combinaisons de mots (2007), and (for English) the LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations (1997) and the Macmillan Collocations Dictionary (2010).

Statistically significant collocation

Student's t-test can be used to determine whether the occurrence of a collocation in a corpus is statistically significant. For a bigram $w_{1}w_{2}$, let $P(w_{1})={\frac {\#w_{1}}{N}}$ be the unconditional probability of occurrence of $w_{1}$ in a corpus with size $N$, and let $P(w_{2})={\frac {\#w_{2}}{N}}$ be the unconditional probability of occurrence of $w_{2}$ in the corpus. Then the t-score for the bigram $w_{1}w_{2}$ is calculated as:

$t={\frac {{\bar {x}}-\mu }{\sqrt {\frac {s^{2}}{N}}}},$

where ${\bar {x}}={\frac {\#w_{i}w_{j}}{N}}$ is the sample mean of the occurrence of $w_{1}w_{2}$, $\#w_{1}w_{2}$ is the number of occurrences of $w_{1}w_{2}$, $\mu =P(w_{i})P(w_{j})$ is the probability of $w_{1}w_{2}$ under the null-hypothesis that $w_{1}$ and $w_{2}$ appear independently in the text, and $s^{2}={\bar {x}}(1-{\bar {x}})\approx {\bar {x}}$ is the sample variance. With a large $N$, the t-test is equivalent to a z-test.

See also

• English collocations
• Agreement (linguistics)
• Cliché
• Collocational restriction
• Collostructional analysis
• Compound noun, adjective and verb
• Government (linguistics)
• Isocolon
• Lexical item
• N-gram
• Phrasal verb
• Phraseology
• Phraseme
• Siamese twins (linguistics)
• Sketch Engine
• Word sketch

External links

• [2] Ozdic Collocation Dictionary
• A Small System Storing Spanish Collocations (Igor A. Bolshakov & Sabino Miranda-Jiménez)
• Morphological characterization of collocations and semantic relationships in Spanish (Sabino Miranda-Jiménez & Igor A. Bolshakov)
• Example of collocations for the word "Surgery"