Word Usage and Vocabulary in context

Lecture 8

Words in combinations: Collocations

do homework ×make homework

make mistakes ×do mistakes

tall man/woman ×tall man/woman

high mountain ×high mountain

• Fast food, but not quick food

• Quick look, but not fast look

• Commit suicide, but not make suicide

• Cut a finger, but not cut grass

• Mow grass, but not mow a finger

boring, certain, drunk,

stupid, sure, tired, worried

dead

heavily

drink,

smoke

rain

The meaning ‘beginning

start/begin (theatre performance etc.)

kick off (soccer match)

fall (night)

break (day or dawn, poetic language)

What is a collocation?

• Collocation means a natural combination of words; It refers to the way words are closely associated with each other.

Why learn collocations?

• They will help you to speak and write English in a more natural and accurate way.

• Learning collocations will also help you to increase your range of English vocabualry.

Caution

• We cannot substitute a word in a collocation with a related word.

• Collocations should not be confused with idioms.

Free combination→bound collocation→ frozen idiom

Exercises

• http://www.better-english.com/strongcollocation/coll1.htm

• http://www.englishmedialab.com/cloze/Adjective%20noun%20collocation/index.html

• http://www.edict.com.hk/vlc/collocation/wordpartners1.htm

Corpus linguistics

• It is the study of language as expressed in samples (corpora) or "real world" text.

• Corpus lingusitics uses large collections of both spoken and written natural texts that are stored on computers.

Corpus linguistics

• Corpus lingusits can explore different questions about language use.

• 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.

Collocations in corpus linguistics

• In corpus linguistics, collocation is defined as a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance.

Collocation comprises the restrictions on how words can be used together, for example which prepositions are used with particular verbs, or which verbs and nouns are used together.

Links to Online Corpora

• http://www.americancorpus.org/

• http://www.lextutor.ca/concord_writer/