Collocation

Collocation

Collocation is a linguistic phenomenon in which one 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 a British linguist J. R Firth, who can be credited with establishing the concept in modern linguistics. Collocation was given a new accord in the realm of meaning, separated from the ideas of cognitive ability in semantics. Even so, he 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.