Collocation

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For collocation methods for the solution of differential equations, see collocation method.

Within the area of corpus linguistics, collocation is defined as a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance, they form a syntactic and semantic unit, whose meaning cannot be derived compositionally, i.e. it cannot be derived directly from the meaning of its components.

Collocation refers to 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.

1 Common features
2 Expanded definition
3 Examples
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Common features

Non-compositionality: The meaning of a collocation is not a straightforward composition of the meaning of its parts. For example, the meaning of kick the bucket has nothing to do with kicking buckets.

Non-substitutability: We cannot substitute a word in a collocation with a related word. For example, we cannot say yellow wine instead of white wine although both yellow and white are the names of colors.

Non-modifiability: We cannot modify a collocation or apply syntactic transformations. For example, John kicked the green bucket or the bucket was kicked has nothing to do with dying.

[edit] Expanded definition

If the expression is heard often, the words become 'glued' together in our minds. 'Crystal clear', 'middle management' 'nuclear family' and 'cosmetic surgery' are examples of collocated pairs of words. Some words are often found together because they make up a compound noun, for example 'riding boots' or 'motor cyclist'.

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.

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-score, log-likelihood.

[edit] Examples

In English the verb perform is used with operation, but not with discussion: The doctor performed the operation.

Collocates of 'bank' are: central, river, account, manager, merchant, money, deposits, lending, society. These examples reflect a number of common expressions, 'central bank', 'bank or building society', and so forth. It is easy to see how the meaning of 'bank' is partly expressed through the choice of collocates.

High collocates with probability, but not with chance: a high probability but a good chance