1. MODULE 2 Meaning and discourse in English
COLLOCATION
Lecture 4

2. 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.

3. 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).

4. Collocational meaning (1)
Collocational meaning refers to the associations that a word acquires in its collocation:
e.g.
girl
boy boy
woman man
pretty flower handsome
garden car
colour overcoat
village

5. Collocational meaning (2)
A word can gain different collocational meaning in different contexts:
e.g.
green on the job white man
green fruit white wine
green with envy white noise
white coffee
These different meanings of “green” and “white”are
polysemous but they are caused by the different
collocation, i.e. the change in verbal context

6. 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).

7. 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 non-compositionality. e.g. to hear it through the grapevine.

8. Non-substitutability
We cannot substitute near-synonyms for the components of a collocation.
e.g. We can’t 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

9. 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

10. 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 Donaldson’s door
- a man knocked on the metal front door

11. 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

12. 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)

13. 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)

14. 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?
I’m under the weather
to wear your heart on your sleeve
red herring

15. 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 ?

16. 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.

17. How do I learn collocations?
Noticing collocations when you read
Storing collocations: organised lexical notebook
Revising and practicing collocations

18. 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

19. Note down your collocation mistakes
Collocation is mostly about pairings of words so students will often use a mis-collocation, e.g. high house
You should record your written mis-collocations

20. 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: that’s right; other verbs we could use
are “to pass”, “to fail” or also “to
retake”

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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 don’t appear in similar contexts
Flu victims, flu sufferers
Crime victims, crime sufferers??

24. 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)

25. Use special notebooks for collocation
Prepare a special lexicon for collocations. It is helpful to organise it like this:
- do not record more
than five collocates
- use only strong, frequent collocates
attract
be subject to
criticism
deserve
react to

26. 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

27. 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

28. Concordancing software
Tapor freeware (this will give you concordances of any word in a text)
Wordsmith Tools (excellent but expensive)