Salwaa/Draft

Collocation

Collocation is a linguistic phenomenon in which two or more lexical items tend to simultaneously appear together in the natural use of a language. It refers to a set of words that are frequently paired or combined together on the basis of more than just syntax and semantics.

Historical Context

The term was first used by J. R Firth, who can be credited with establishing the concept in modern linguistics. The British linguist famously said "You shall know a word by a company it keeps" to introduce collocation. He argued that what makes up the meaning of a word derives from the other words in which it co-occurs.

"Meaning by collocation is an abstraction at the syntagmatic level and is not directly concerned with the conceptual or idea approach to the meaning of words. One of the meanings of night is its collocability with dark, and of dark, of course, collocation with night. " (Firth, 1957)

In this way, collocation was given a new accord in the realm of meaning that is separated from the ideas of cognitive ability in semantics. Even so, Firth stated that collocation can only be defined by a repetitive combination of semantically related words. Hence it also required a quantitative basis to study the actual numbers of the occurrences when certain lexical items make an appearance together.

Type

• verb-object

• adjective-noun

Example

   (i)    "Make an effort,"

   (ii)   'Key issue'

Difference with other concepts, e.g. idioms

References

• Brezina, V., McEnery, T., & Wattam, S. (2015). Collocations in context: A new perspective on collocation networks. International journal of corpus linguistics, 20(2).
• McKeown, K. R., & Radev, D. R. (2000). Collocations. Handbook of Natural Language Processing. Marcel Dekker.