See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/233559868

Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English

Article  in  International Journal of Lexicography · March 2003

DOI: 10.1093/ijl/16.1.57

CITATIONS READS

84 34,605

1 author:

Michael Klotz
Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg
18 PUBLICATIONS   105 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Michael Klotz on 27 May 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 wnloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ijl/article-abstract/16/1/57/931236 by Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Zweigbibliothek user on 09 May 20
Reviews 57

God’s word in German Protestantism (217–25) is slightly out of focus – however many
hermeneutic questions are language-based.
Although many articles of the first section are at least partially historical, the second
part deals with more narrowly period-specific problems, such as Wegera’s corpus-
based analysis of âventiure (roughly: ‘adventure’) (229 – 44) or Kühlmann’s thorough
discussion of 16th-century medical terminology (245–62) based on his planned critical
edition of the works of Paracelsus (1493–1541). This links up with Telle’s analysis of
the lexical problems of alchemical riddles, whose (pseudo-Paracelsian) authors aimed
at dark, enigmatic diction (263–77). Besch returns to biblical translation, documenting
lexical change in the Zürich Bible, basing his analysis on the 1523 glossary (279–96).
Schildt’s stimulating but sadly short article (297–302) treats valency changes as a con-
sequence of verbal prefixation in EMG. 17th/18th-century Dutch as a topic of German
linguistic reflection – a dialect or independent standard language? – is competently sum-
marized by Roelcke (303–19). Finally, Schmidt (321– 42) reflects on how far variation/
uncertainty in morphology and syntax in modern German mirror similar conditions of
EMG – where no ideal native speakers or prescriptive grammars and dictionaries are
available for tests of acceptability or correctness.
The collection is a convincing festschrift tailored to Reichmann’s interests. The focus
on German (and the treatment in German) is intentional, however much some readers
may regret that phenomena and developments have not been placed in a European
context: many of the historical problems and synchronic-methodological questions
have close parallels in, or permit enlightening contrasts with, other European nations/
languages.

Manfred Görlach
University of Cologne

Crowther, J., Dignen, S., and Lea, D. (eds.). Oxford Collocations Dictionary
for Students of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2002. xiii+897 pages.
ISBN 0-19-431-2437. £12.00.

As John Sinclair (1998: 15) remarked, on the syntagmatic dimension collocation is the
simplest and most basic aspect of linguistic description; yet, because of its very basicity,
a knowledge of how words collocate is indispensable to the learner. With the Oxford
Collocations Dictionary for Students of English (OCD) a major EFL publisher has
brought out a major new dictionary to address the learners’ needs in this field.
The aim of the dictionary is to provide collocations for approximately 9000 headwords
as an aid in language production. The headword list only contains lexical words, i.e.
nouns, verbs and adjectives. Since there is a policy decision to exclude nouns as collocates
from verb and adjective entries (p. ix; see the further discussion below), noun entries are
generally richest in collocation and the majority of entries in the dictionary actually do
concern nouns. Thus the first ten pages of letter D contain 24 adjective, 22 verb and 51
noun entries.
Furthermore, words which share a common collocational range are treated jointly in
usage notes; for instance the usage note at Crimes gives collocations which are relevant
not only for the lexeme crime, but also for its hyponyms murder, perjury, espionage,
etc. This is strongly reminiscent of Halliday’s (1961: 276) concept of the lexical set;
here and elsewhere the dictionary’s policies appear to be firmly based in linguistic theory –
although this is nowhere (and need not be) explicitly mentioned. Usage notes contained
 wnloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ijl/article-abstract/16/1/57/931236 by Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Zweigbibliothek user on 09 May 20
58 Reviews

in the dictionary cover 25 lexical sets from Aristocratic titles through Languages to Works
of Art.
Any dictionary that deals with collocations first has to find a working definition of
the concept itself, especially since the term is not used in the same way by all linguists.
The question of what to include as a collocation in the dictionary thus depends on the
underlying concept of collocation. Generally speaking, a wider, statistically-based con-
cept drawing on large corpora as advocated by Sinclair (e.g. 1966) can be distinguished
from a more restricted concept based on semantic unpredictability and interdependency
such as is suggested by Hausmann (e.g. 1984)1. The editors of the OCD have decided for
a pragmatic and lexicographically useful compromise between both positions: according
to the introduction (pp. viii-ix) corpora (most notably the BNC with its 100 million
word tokens) were used to find out statistically salient combinations, which were then
assessed in terms of their usefulness to the learner. The resulting concept is thus more
inclusive than Hausmann’s (collocations such as public announcement,2 honest answer or
feel anxiety are included although they are semantically quite predictable), but at the
same time more restrictive than Sinclair’s ( yesterday’s announcement, only answer and
some anxiety are not present, although they frequently co-occur in the BNC and are also
listed in the statistically based Collins COBUILD English Collocations on CD-Rom
(1995)).
Incidentally, the use of the BNC as a primary source of information also means that
the variety of language covered in the dictionary is British English; the preface describes
the variety further as that of predominantly the ‘educated non-specialist’ (p. ix).
Collocations included comprise not only those between fully lexical words (consider-
able harm), but also those between lexical words and prepositions (harm to), i.e. parts of
Benson’s (1985) grammatical collocations. From a different theoretical perspective one
might have argued that the latter is a case of valency or complementation and could
have been excluded from the dictionary – all the more so, since this type of inform-
ation is covered much more extensively in general learners’ dictionaries than lexical
collocation.
The coverage of collocations achieved is very impressive indeed. Six randomly chosen
articles – crowd (n.), fortune (n.), late (adj.), pace (vb.), satisfactory (adj.) and thank (vb.) –
together contain 210 collocations; in comparison the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of
English (Benson et al., second edition, 1997), which can be seen as the main competitor
on the market, only gives 64 collocations in the same articles.3 Notwithstanding the
possibility that the editors of the BBI adhered to a more restrictive concept of collocation,
the extended coverage of collocations in the OCD is certainly also a result of the corpus-
based method, which brings to light many typical combinations which would have
escaped intuition. However, the BBI also contains some useful collocations which are not
to be found in the OCD. For example, in the BBI entry for crowd we find bad crowd and
wrong crowd (as in getting in with the wrong crowd ), both of which are missing from the
OCD. In the entry for cover collocations for the meaning ‘‘report on’’, such as cover
extensively or cover live, are missing entirely; the BBI gives at least the latter collocation.
On the other hand the exclusion of some BBI collocations from the OCD seems to be
justified if one considers corpus evidence. For example tremendous crowd and fast crowd,
which are both contained in the BBI, can be found neither in the BNC nor the 56 million
word tokens of the COBUILD WordBanks Corpus. Their exclusion from the OCD
therefore seems well justified.
Since collocation is most typically an association of two words (e.g. hard cash), a
dictionary of collocations has to decide in which entry (hard or cash) a collocation should
be listed. The OCD here follows an insight most notably pointed out by Hausmann
(1984): collocation is a directed relationship between a semantically autonomous base
 wnloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ijl/article-abstract/16/1/57/931236 by Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Zweigbibliothek user on 09 May 20
Reviews 59

and a semantically dependent collocate. Thus for hard cash it can be argued that the
meaning of cash is autonomous, i.e. independent of the context, whereas the semantic
interpretation of hard depends on the base, e.g. in hard cash vs. hard labour. As
Hausmann points out, all language production will take the autonomous base as a
starting point and then look for a suitable collocate, which means that the collocation
must be listed in the base entry. In the OCD this insight has led to the exclusion of all
nouns (which are generally autonomous) from verb and adjective entries. This decision
unclutters verb and adjective entries and – given the limitation of size which exists for
any dictionary – creates more space for further entries. Another consequence is that
some high-frequency words which are largely delexicalised (i.e. very strongly context
dependent), such as bring, come and make, are not contained in the headword list.
The structure of the entries is very clear. Polysemous lemmata are first subdivided into
senses; collocates in each sense section are then arranged according to word class; finally
within each word class section similar collocates are grouped together. Some of the
collocations are further illustrated by example sentences, which with some occasional
modifications were taken from a corpus.
The structuring of the entries is supported by an excellent layout, which uses Arabic
numbers for senses, bullets followed by small capitals for word class and bold print for
individual collocates. The system makes it easy to find relevant information without
scanning the whole article.
Senses of polysemous lemmata are indicated by short glosses, which – as the
introduction (p. x) points out – should not be taken as full definitions. Rather, they act as
a reminder of which sense of the base the given collocates belong to. Accordingly, if an
entry deals with a single sense, no gloss is given at all. While this is unproblematic for
monosemous items, it creates certain problems for those items which have several senses
of which only one is dealt with in the entry.
For example, a user who wants to find out which verbs to use with the noun test is –
amongst others – presented in the OCD with the collocation take a test. Next the user
might ask him or herself how people take tests (i.e. successfully, etc.) and will find in the
entry for take the adverb collocates well, badly, seriously and philosophically. Using that
information the user might be misguided into phrasing a sentence like *He took the
language test badly, meaning ‘‘he failed it’’. The problem is that the entry take only deals
with a very specific meaning of the verb, i.e. ‘‘adopt a certain attitude towards sb./sth.’’
Since this is the only sense dealt with in the article, there is no gloss which would indicate
that specific sense of take and hence no indication that the given collocates only apply
to that sense.
A similar problem can be seen in the case of ill feeling. Evidence from the BNC suggests
that quantification of feeling is possible here, e.g. by much (_ it produced much ill feeling
towards Baxter. BNC-ALK 187) and a lot of (_ there will be a lot of ill feeling _ BNC-
K1Y 1387), but there is no evidence for intensification of ill; and in fact phrases like
quite ill feeling or very ill feeling are decidedly odd. However, quite and very are offered as
intensifying adverb collocates in the entry ill. Again the problem lies in the fact that ill
in collocation with feeling means ‘‘bad, negative’’ and is itself collocationally much
more restricted than ill meaning ‘‘suffer from disease’’; and it is only this latter sense
which is treated in the entry ill. Again, since this is the only sense dealt with in the article,
there is no clarifying gloss.
Cases like these show how complex collocational facts can be; maybe the description
of these complexities are also beyond what can reasonably be expected from a dictionary
like the one under review. Nevertheless the problem outlined is very real for the language
learner and consistently giving sense glosses in all entries might have overcome that
problem at least partially.
 wnloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ijl/article-abstract/16/1/57/931236 by Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Zweigbibliothek user on 09 May 20
60 Reviews

The ordering of collocations into word classes is generally unproblematic. Only

occasionally can decisions taken be questioned here. One such point is that the OCD
uses the label ADJ not just for adjectives but also for attributive nouns. For example, the
ADJ section of fleet contains not only collocates such as great, small, foreign but also
battle, invasion and car. This inclusion of attributive nouns into the ADJ section may
make sense from a lexicographic point of view – users will see foreign fleet and battle
fleet as parallel cases – but from a linguistic perspective it is doubtful. Maybe a different
label such as ATTRIB would have been more appropriate.
The opposite case of a linguistically sound classification which might be doubtful
from a lexicographic point of view can be seen in the entry for pace. Here the collocates
about, around and round are given twice: in the section ADV as well as PREP. Linguis-
tically, this is sound, since both He started pacing about and He started pacing about the
room are possible; whether the average user can make sense of the distinction, especially
in the absence of example sentences, seems questionable.
In addition to the ADV and PREP sections in the main entries, the OCD occasionally
describes combinations of verbzparticle as phrasal verbs. At least two factors seem
to have guided the lexicographers in deciding what to do with verb z particle combina-
tions. Firstly, idiomatic uses were considered phrasal verbs; thus rest on can be found
twice in the dictionary, in the main entry with the literal meaning of rest (His hands rested
lightly on her shoulders) and as a phrasal verb with a transferred meaning of rest (It is rare
for the responsibility for causing conflict to rest solely on one side). Secondly, those cases
where a verb must be followed by a particle were also considered phrasal verbs. For that
reason rely on is treated as a phrasal verb whereas decide on is contained in the PREP
section of the main entry.
Within the word class sections collocates are grouped together in terms of semantic
similarity. For example, biting and brilliant are grouped together as collocates for
satire and delicately and lightly for scented. It is clear that these collocates, although
semantically similar, are not synonyms of each other; delicately scented suggests a level
of refinement which is not present in lightly scented and a brilliant satire needn’t
necessarily be biting (or vice versa). Since these subtle differences between collocations
are not pointed out in the dictionary, the question of whether a user will be able to
‘‘express himself much more clearly and be able to convey not just a general meaning,
but something quite precise’’ (p. vii) is largely a matter of the users’ proficiency. From
that point of view, the dictionary seems to be best suited for advanced learners, who are
familiar with most of the bases and collocates in the dictionary but need to be reminded
of the combinatorial possibilities of these words.
Without doubt, even a quite advanced learner can benefit immensely from this
dictionary, because the depth of descriptive detail given in many entries is impressive
indeed. For example, the entry satisfactory predicts that the intensifier collocates entirely,
totally and wholly occur in negative contexts (in contrast to perfectly, which is neutral).
On a similar level of descriptive detail the dictionary informs the user that very/
extremely hard are collocations concerning either the physical solidity of substances
(e.g. very hard ground/wood/etc.) or the extent of difficulty of something (e.g. extremely
hard work/time/etc.) whereas really hard only applies to the latter. Both analyses are
confirmed by a look at BNC data.
In sum, the OCD is a major achievement. It can reasonably be seen as the most
comprehensive dictionary of English collocations on the EFL-market. By virtue of its
clear structure and wealth of descriptive detail, it will prove an excellent resource
not only for advanced non-native speakers of English but also for English native
speakers who want to be reminded of the rich collocational possibilities of their own
language.
 wnloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ijl/article-abstract/16/1/57/931236 by Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Zweigbibliothek user on 09 May 20
Reviews 61

Notes
1.
For a discussion of the merits and problems of these concepts see Herbst (1996) and
Klotz (2000: 63–99).
2.
Headwords of articles in the OCD, from which collocations were taken, are
underlined.
3.
Coverage in the Collins COBUILD English Collocations on CD-Rom is more difficult
to compare, since this database adheres to a very different concept of collocation.
However, even without giving exact numbers it is fair to say that in terms of coverage
the OCD compares favourably with the COBUILD collocations CD-Rom as well. This
is partly due to the fact that on the COBUILD CD collocate listings are restricted to
maximally twenty items.

References
Benson, M. 1985. ‘Collocations and Idioms’ in R. Ilson (ed.), Dictionaries, Lexicography
and Language Learning. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 61–8.
Benson M., Benson, E., and Ilson, R. 1997. The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English:
A Guide to Word Combinations. (Second edition.) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Collins COBUILD English Collocations on CD-Rom. 1995. Glasgow: Collins.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1961. ‘Categories of the Theory of Grammar.’ Word 17: 241–92.
Hausmann, F. J. 1984. ‘Wortschatzlernen ist Kollokationslernen.’ Praxis des
Neusprachlichen Unterrichts 31: 395– 406.
Herbst, T. 1996. ‘What are Collocations – Sandy Beaches or False Teeth?’ English Studies
77.4: 379–93.
Klotz, M. 2000. Grammatik und Lexik – Studien zur Syntagmatik englischer Verben.
Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
Sinclair, J. McH. 1966. ‘Beginning the study of lexis’ in C. E. Bazell, J. C. Catford,
M. A. K. Halliday and R. H. Robins (eds.), In Memory of J. R. Firth. London:
Longman, 410–30.
Sinclair, J. McH. 1998. ‘The lexical item’ in Weigand, E. (ed.), Contrastive Lexical
Semantics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1–24.

Michael Klotz
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Bismarckstr. 1
91054 Erlangen, Germany

Sylvie Cloeren (ed.) Dictionnaire Cambridge Klett Compact Français-Anglais,

English-French. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. 1375 pages.
ISBN 0-521-75296-5. Cloth with CD-ROM. GBP 13.

The new Dictionnaire Compact Français-Anglais, English-French (CKC), from

Cambridge University Press, claims coverage of ‘115,000 words, phrases and examples’,
and ‘155,000 translations’. It is much smaller than the standard editions of the ‘Big Four’
(Oxford-Hachette, Harraps, Collins-Robert and Larousse), which have more than 300,000
‘references’, but is similar to, for example, the Compact Oxford-Hachette, with ‘over
110,000 words and phrases’, and ‘over 160,000 translations’. The ratio ‘references’ to

View publication stats