MODULE 2

Meaning and discourse in English

COLLOCATION

Lecture 4

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 Why do you say deep water
and not profound water?
 “A word is known by the company it keeps”
(JR Firth)

- tremble with fear tremble with excitement*

- quiver with excitement quiver with fear*

There is no definable reason why we choose to say

“tremble with fear” but not “quiver with fear”. It is
simply a question of COLLOCATION.
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 What is collocation?

 COLLOCATION refers to a relationship between words that frequently occur

together
 The words together can mean more than the sum of their parts (The Times
of India, disk drive)
- other examples: hot dog, mother in law
 Examples of collocations
 noun phrases like strong tea and weapons of mass destruction

 phrasal verbs like to make up, and other phrases like the rich and

powerful.
 Valid or invalid?
 a stiff breeze but not a stiff wind (while either a strong breeze or a strong

wind is okay).
 Broad/bright daylight (but not narrow darkness).
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 Collocational meaning (1)
 Collocational meaning refers to the
associations that a word acquires in its
collocation:
e.g.
girl
boy boy
woman man
pretty flower handsome
garden car
colour overcoat
village

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 Collocational meaning (2)
 A word can gain different collocational meaning in
different contexts:
e.g.
green on the job white man
green fruit white wine
green with envy white noise
white coffee

These different meanings of “green” and “white”are

polysemous but they are caused by the different
collocation, i.e. the change in verbal context

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Criteria for collocations
 Typical criteria for collocations:
- non-compositionality
- non-substitutability
- non-modifiability.

 Collocations usually cannot be translated into

other languages word by word.

 A phrase can be a collocation even if it is not

consecutive (as in the example knock . . . door).

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 Non-compositionality

 A phrase is compositional if the meaning can predicted from

the meaning of the parts.
 e.g. new companies

 A phrase is non-compositional if the meaning cannot be

predicted from the meaning of the parts
 e.g. hot dog

 Collocations are not necessarily fully compositional in that

there is usually an element of meaning added to the
combination. e.g. strong tea.
 Idioms are the most extreme examples of non-
compositionality. e.g. to hear it through the grapevine.
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 Non-substitutability

 We cannot substitute near-synonyms for the

components of a collocation.
e.g. We can’t say yellow wine instead of white wine even
though yellow is as good a description of the color of
white wine as white is (it is kind of a yellowish white).

 Many collocations cannot be freely modified with

additional lexical material or through grammatical
transformations (Non-modifiability).
 e.g. white wine, but not whiter wine
 mother in law, but not mother in laws
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 Linguistic Subclasses of
Collocations
 Light verbs:
- Verbs with little semantic content like make, take and
do.
- e.g. make lunch, take it easy,
 Verb particle constructions
- e.g. to go down
 Proper nouns
- e.g. Bill Clinton
 Terminological expressions refer to concepts and
objects in technical domains.
- e.g. Hydraulic oil filter 9
 Collocations at a distance

 Many collocations occur at variable

distances. For example knock
collocates with door but at a distance
- she knocked on his door
- they knocked at the door
- 100 women knocked on Donaldson’s
door
- a man knocked on the metal front door
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Finding collocations
 Software is able to scan texts for the
most frequently collocated words using
the criterion of frequency, i.e. by
counting the words which most
frequently appear together
 This usually produces a lot of function
words which need to be filtered out

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An example of a frequency
count

 This shows the most

frequent collocations
of pairs of words
(bigrams) in a
corpus of
newspaper articles.
 The are all function
words (except New
York)

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Frequency count after filtering
This chart shows the
most frequent collocations
after filtering out the
function words. The
capital letters refer to the
part of speech
(A = Adjective, N = Noun)

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 Idioms - characteristics (1)
 Idioms are strictly non-compositional
Although the word that make up the idiom have
Their own literal meanings, in the idiom they
have lost their individual identity. You canot
predict the meaning of an idiom from the sum of
its parts:
e.g. how do you do?
I’m under the weather
to wear your heart on your sleeve
red herring

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Idioms - characteristics (2)
 Structural stability (syntactic frozenness)

1. Constituents cannot be replaced

e.g. as good as gold / as good as play ?

2. Constituents cannot be deleted or added to

e.g. out of the question / out of question ?

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 In which areas of language
learning is collocation useful?
Collocation is important at all levels for
 Writing

 Translation

You will only be able to write well if you

know which words go together.

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 How do I learn collocations?

 Noticing collocations when you read

 Storing collocations: organised lexical

notebook

 Revising and practicing collocations

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 Which collocations should I
learn?

 Unique collocations (foot the bill, shrug your shoulders)

 Strong collocations (ulterior motives, rancid butter,
trenchant criticism, to be moved to tears)
 Medium collocations (to make a mistake, to be recovering
from a major operation)
 Weak collocations (white wine, red hair, a black mood, a
blue movie)

It is best to learn the strong collocations

because they are unusual
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 Note down your collocation
mistakes

 Collocation is mostly about pairings of

words so students will often use a mis-
collocation, e.g. high house

 You should record your written mis-

collocations

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 Learn extra collocations

 Note down the extra collocations you learn in

class:
e.g. S: I have to make an exam
T: what verb do we use with “exam”?
S: “take”
T: that’s right; other verbs we could use
are “to pass”, “to fail” or also “to
retake”
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 Try to extend what you know

 Even when you get something right you

can extend your collocational
knowledge
e.g. S: I was very disappointed
T: You could also say “bitterly”
or “deeply” disappointed

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 Finding collocations in a text

 Underline useful collocations and put

them in your notebooks

 Read different types of text so you build

up your mental lexicons in a balanced
way

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Some typical collocation
exercises
 Synonyms: identify words appearing
frequently in similar contexts
Blast victims were helped by the neighbours
Flu victims were helped by the doctors
Crime victims were helped by the police
 Collocations: identify synonyms that don’t
appear in similar contexts
Flu victims, flu sufferers
Crime victims, crime sufferers??

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 Record and recycle
 Always write down new collocations in
special notebooks in a systematic order
such as recording them in topic groups.

 It is important to repeat the content of

the notebook in order to acquire it fully
(recycling)

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Use special notebooks for
collocation
 Prepare a special lexicon for collocations. It is
helpful to organise it like this:

attract
- do not record
more
be subject to
than five
collocates deserve
criticism
- use only strong,
react to frequent
collocates

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Learning idioms
 Since collocations and idioms have a lot
in common they should be learned in a
similar way

e.g. identifying of idioms, guessing

meaning from context, recording them
in notebooks

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Dictionaries
 The LTP Dictionary of Selected
Collocations
 Oxford Collocations Dictionary for
Students of English
 Cambridge International Dictionary of
Idioms
 Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Idioms
 Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms
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Concordancing software
 Tapor freeware (this will give you
concordances of any word in a text)

 Wordsmith Tools (excellent but

expensive)

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