Collocation

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.

The statement can also be a basis for why collocation, in people's minds, consisted of such words as "doctor – hospital – nurse”. This is because the lexical items belong to the same semantic field, which has the tendency to co-occur in the same context.

Qualification and Examples

Over the course of linguistic studies, three criteria to qualify for collocation have been proposed.

• Distance

To study the potential relationship between a node word (the word we are interested in) and the collocate, there is a need to look for a "collocation window." It specifies the length we look for a range of words around our particular word of interest. Depending on the word studied, it can be as short as one word or as long as four words on each side of the node word.

 (i) Example: Technology

If the collocation window for each side of "technology" is set between four our five words, there is a possibility to find words such "innovation", "digital", "artificial intelligence", "internet", etc. These words may not be directly adjacent to "technology", but they're within the specified distance and share a strong relation with it in a broader context.

• Frequency

As stated before, how often a word is used in pairs is important. Part of what makes a collocation sound "correct" is the consensus that it is widely accepted by natives. 

 (ii) Example: In love

Since "in" and "love" often appear together, "in love" is a common expression in English. However, "in" can also be used with a wide range of other words, such as "case" or "fact". Thus, the relationship between "love" and "in" is not exclusive. This is where Gries (2013) tries to suggest considering dispersion as a support. Dispersion refers to the distribution of the node and the collocates in one set corpus. Through this corpus, the pair which appeared more often would be revealed.

• Exclusivity

This criteria refers to the extent to which a certain collocate is linked to the "node word", in relation to other possible collocates.

 (iii)  Example: Traffic jam

The collocate "jam" has a high-exclusivity connection with the node word "traffic" because in this context, "jam" means a situation where movement is slowed - identical to the traffic congestion.

References

Bartsch, S., Evert, S., & Erlangen-Nürnberg, F. (2014). Towards a Firthian Notion of Collocation.

Brezina, V., McEnery, T., & Wattam, S. (2015). Collocations in context: A new perspective on collocation networks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 20(2), pp 139-173.

Bobkova, T. (2016) “Classification of Collocation: The Main Approaches and Criteria”, Respectus Philologicus, 29(34), pp. 87–98. doi:10.15388/RESPECTUS.2016.29.34.09

Krishnamurthy, R. (2006). Collocations. Encylopedia of Language & Linguistics, 596-600. DOI: 10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/00414-4.