From Phrontistery To Logorrhea

COLLOCATIONS

CERPresents

A Language Learning Opportunity

What is a Collocation?

A COLLOCATION is an expression consisting of two or more words that correspond to some conventional way of saying things.The words together can mean more than

their sum of parts (The Times of India, disk drive)

Examples of Collocations

Collocations include noun phrases like strong tea and weapons of mass destruction, phrasal verbs like to make up, and other stock phrases like the rich and powerful.a stiff breeze but not ??

a stiff wind (while either a strong breeze or a strong wind is okay). broad daylight (but not ?bright daylight or ??narrow darkness).

Collocations are not fully compositional in that there is usually an element of meaning added to the combination. Eg. strong tea.

Idioms are the most extreme examples of non-compositionality.

Eg. to hear it through the grapevine.

Not fully compositional

WHY

COLLOCATIONS

ARE

IMPORTANT

Learners need to be aware of the fact that words, in Thornbury's phrase, "hunt in packs." (1998:8)

That is to say, all words have their own, unique collocational fields.

Collocations can be defined in numerous ways (see Moon 1997:43), but for pedagogical purposes it is more practical to restrict the term to the following: two or three word clusters which occur with a more than chance regularity throughout spoken and written English.

Types of collocation

Verb + noun throw a party / accept responsibility

Adjective + noun square meal / grim determination

Verb + adjective + noun take vigorous exercise / make steady progress

Adverb + verb strongly suggest / barely see

Adverb + adjective utterly amazed / completely useless

Adverb + adjective + noun totally unacceptable behavior

Adjective + preposition guilty of / blamed for / happy about

Noun + noun * pay packet / window frame

Below are the most easily distinguishable types:

Time for

DICTIONARY ACTIVITY

G e tmarried

The Siamese twins of language