Collocation is common term that could be found in any language.

Collocations are very

important part of knowledge of writing and speaking in English language. Choosing the
right collocation will make the speech and writing more natural and more native-like. On the
other hand, people makes many mistakes in collocations that can be unnatural or
unacceptable and just sound "wrong” though it is grammatically correct. For example, in
English you say quick food but fast food”, though quick and fast here both mean speed. You
may say quick food and can be understood but of course it does not sound natural and
sometimes your speech provokes a smile. Therefore, this creates many difficulties for
learners.
This syntax course is an introduction to the basic concepts and methods of syntactic analysis
and description and the foundation principles of theory. The relationship between collocation
and syntax is shown in that collocation is the way words go together to produce natural pieces
of language, while syntax concerns the combination of words into phrases and sentences. In
other words, when discussing collocations we cannot help talking about common syntactic
features like words, phrases, sentences... .
Collocations play an important role for English language. However, they are often confusing
to learners not only because of their various syntactic requirements, but also the double-
function of their elements. To address these problems, this essay find out the structures of
collocations in terms of phrasal level and show the linkage among word classes to form
different types of collocations. Besides, basing on the analysis of the finding, it will be
contributions to help the English learners with their collocation understanding and using.

The first used of colloation as a linguistic term was in 1933s, when it appeared as the units
of words that are combinatory in Second Interim Report on English Collocations of Palmer.
This term is becoming typical and close to nowadays uses, such as a natural combination of
words (Gyllstad, 2007). In Oxford Collocations Dictionary (2003), collocation is a particular
combination of words or the way words combine in a language to produce natural and native
sounding speech.
A wide range of researchers analyzed collocation. Beginning with J. R. Firth (1957) is
exceptionally regarded for his commitments and creating of collocations, he is viewed as
father of collocation. He presented "collocation" for qualities and as often as possible
intermittent word blends, contending that the importance and utilization of a word can be
controlled by neighboring words. He considers collocation as habitual co-occurrence of
words, such as: rotten food, rancid butter. Alhalaby agrees with Firth in his definition of
collocation and aslo agrees with Firth in his definition of collocation and on the habitual co-
occurrence of certain words. Because of the restrictions of collocations, we can not change
the word of these collocations.
Baldwin and Kim( 2010) state that collocations are compositional and statistically idiomatic
multiword expressions. Collocations have some features in common with idiom. In particular,
idioms and collocations belong to the set phrases of a language. In contrary, collocations are
different from idioms in meaning, while the meaning of an idiom is mostly incomprehensible
if not previously heard, collocations are compositional: their meanings can be deduced from
the meaning of their component words(Smadja, 1993). However, collocations are arbitrary.
For example, the expression I do morning excercises is correct in English, but the expression
I make morning excersices is not. In this particular example, we use the verb to do and not
the verb to make can be considered as an arbitrary convention. In addition, Smadja(1993)
also adds some collocates exhibit delexical and meta-phorical meanings like a collocation “to
make an attempt” or “to toy with an idea”. Similarly, collocations are cohe-sive lexical
clusters. This means that the presence of one or several component words of a collocation in
a phrase often suggests the existence of the remaining component words of that collo-
cation( Smadja, 1993).
There are many ways to divide collocation in English depending on many different criteria
and features. Martynska(2004) classified collocation into four types followed the restricted
criterion: Unrestricted, semi- restricted, familiar, restricted. Hamid( 2008) devided
collocations into two categories: Upward collocation, downward collocations. However, in
order to demonstrate the relationship with this course, as mentioned above, we decided to
divide collocation into two categories : grammatical collocations and lexical collocations so
that people clearly see the structure of collocation.
According to Bahns (1993), grammatical collocations consist of a noun, or an adjective or a
verb, plus a particle (a preposition, an adverb or a grammatical structure such as an infinitive
a gerund or clause) . The followings are the examples: depend on, afraid of, good at,
comfortable with … . These examples are linguistic collocations which are lexicalized as
single units whose implications are equation based and whose co-occurence are almost
certain. These examples are grammatical collocations which are lexicalized as single units
whose meanings are formulaic and whose co-occurence are highly likely. They sometimes
play role as idiomatic, because their meanings do not relate to the meanings of the elements,
such as run out of (to reach an end of stock, supplies) or put up with ( tolerate). However,
there are similar grammartical combination which do not follow as rules and not relate to
each other like from the outside(Kennedy, 1990)
In The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English, Benson and Ilson (1986) grammatical
collocations fall into the following combinations: noun+preposition, noun+to infinitive,
noun+that-clause, preposition + noun, adjective+ preposition, predicate adjective+ to-
infinitive, adjective+ that-clause, and the English 19 verb patterns.
Firstly, sometimes, noun + preposition combinations can not be considered as collocations
because of the highly predictable meaning of some prepositions, such as of and by. So, noun
+ of / by combinations are considered free combinations. The following phrases are examples
of noun + preposition collocations: blockade against, apathy toward.( Benson and
Ilson,1986).
Secondly, noun + to + infinitive. According to Benson and Ilson(1986), there are five
syntactic patterns in which noun + to + infitive construction is most frequently encountered
a.It was a pleasure ( a problem, a struggle) to do it.
b. They had the foresight (instructions, an obligation, a permission) to do it.
c. They felt a compulsion (an impulse, a need) to do it.
d. They made an attempt (an effort, a promise, a vow) to do it.
e. He was a fool (a genius, an idiot) to do it.
Next, the noun + that-clause combinations that are considered collocational are those using
subject pronouns. For example: He kept a promise that he would get married. In addition, any
combinations of preposition and noun can fall into this category: preposition + noun
combinations, however the choice of preposition with certain noun is not at random. For
example: in great detail, in deep trouble, etc. .
The adjective+ preposition combination that is considered collocational is the one that occurs
in the predicate (verbless clause). However past participial adjective followed by preposition
by is not considered collocational because this construction is regular and predictable. For
example: They are interested in this topic or he is good at Math while His new novel is open-
ended is not considered collocational.
Furthermore, we have predicate adjective + to + infinitive. These adjectives occur in two
basic constructions with infinitives:
a. adjectives with dummy subject “It” such as It was important to complete; also
possible It was important for them to complete(the insertion of prepositional phrase)
b. adjectives with real and animate subject, such as He is tired to study ; or with
inanimate subject, such as : It is wrote to sent to her mom; or with either animate or
inanimate subject: She was bound to find out or It (the accident) was bound to happy
Then, some adjectives can be followed by that clause. For example: He became worried that
she might leap out from behind a door or she felt certain that she’d seen him before. Several
adjectives followed by present subjunctive in formal English are collocational, such as: It was
imperative that we be there. Last but not least, collocational verb patterns. English verb
patterns have 19 types, each is designated here by capital letters A to S. For instance: Tom
begins to speak (Verbs are followed by to + infinitive) or another example : They allowed
their son to go out (Transitive verbs are followed by an object and to + infinitive)

References

Oxford (2003), Oxford Collocations, Oxford University Press, China

Palmer, H. E. (1933). Second Interim Report on English Collocations, Submitted to the Tenth
Annual Conference of English Teachers under the Auspices of the Institute for Research in
English Teaching. Tokyo, Institute for Research in English Teaching.
Gyllstad Henrik. (2007). Testing English Collocations. Lund: Media-Tryck.
Firth. J. R. Papers in linguistics. Oxford university press, London 1934.
Al-Halaby, S. N. Collocational Expressions In English-Arabic Translation. Unpublished
M.A. thesis, University of musil, 2000.
Smadja, F. (1993). Retrieving collocations from text: Xtract. In: Computational Linguistics,
19(1): pp.143-177.
Baldwin, T., and Kim, S. N. (2010). Multiword Expressions. In: Handbook of Natural
Language Processing, second edition. Boca Raton, FL.
Martynska, M. Do English language learners know collocations? Investigationes
Linguisticae, vol. XI, 1-12(2004).
Hamid S. Twana. Investigating Kurd EFL Learners Ability to Recognize and Produce
English Collocation. Unpublished Thesis, Sulimany University (2008).
Bahns, J. 1993.”Lexical collocations: a contrastive view” ELT Journal 47(1):56- 63.
Oxford :Oxford University Press.
Kennedy, G. 1990. “Collocations: where grammar and vocabulary teaching meeet” in
Language Teaching Methodology for the Nineties, RELC, Anthology Series 24.
Benson, M., E. Benson & R. Ilson. the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English. John
Benjamin Publishing Company, (1997).