A STUDY ON WORD COMBINATIONS
USED IN AGATHA CHRISTIE
’S
NOVEL, THE PALE HORSE
THESIS
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of
Sarjana Pendidikan
Grace Maytri Haryono 112008039
ENGLISH DEPARMENT
FACULTY OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
SATYA WACANA CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY
SALATIGA
A STUDY ON WORD COMBINATIONS
USED IN AGATHA CHRISTIE
’S
NOVEL, THE PALE HORSE
THESIS
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of
Sarjana Pendidikan
Grace Maytri Haryono 112008039
ENGLISH DEPARMENT
FACULTY OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
SATYA WACANA CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY
SALATIGA
COPYRIGHT STATEMENT
This thesis contains no such material as has been submitted for examination in any course or accepted for the fulfillment of any degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and my belief, this contains no material previously published or written by any other person except where due reference is made in the text.
Copyright@ 2013. Grace Maytri Haryono.
All rights reserved. No part of this thesis may be reproduced by any means without the permission of at least one of the copyright owners or the English Department, Faculty of Language and Literature, Satya Wacana University, Salatiga.
PUBLICATION AGREEMENT DECLARATION
As a member of the (SWCU) Satya Wacana Christian University academic community, I verify that:
Name : Grace Maytri Haryono Student ID Number : 112008039
Study Program : English Language Education Faculty : Faculty of Language and Literature Kind of Work : Undergraduate Thesis
In developing my knowledge, I agree to provide SWCU with a non – exclusive royalty free right for my intellectual property and the contents therein entitle:
A STUDY ON WORD COMBINATIONS
USED IN AGATHA CHRISTIE’S NOVEL, THE PALE HORSE
along with any pertinent equipment.
With this non – exclusive royalty free right, SWCU maintains the right to copy, reproduce, print, publish, post, display, incorporate, store into a retrieval system or database, transmit, broadcast, barter or sell my intellectual property, in whole or in part without my express written permission, as long as my name still included as the writer.
This declaration is made according to the best of my knowledge.
Table of Content
List of Tables ...VII List of Figurines ...VII
Introduction ...1
Word Combination...3
Free Combination ...4
Collocations ...4
Idioms ...6
Compounds ...7
Statement of the Problem ...8
Research Question ...8
Purpose of the Study ...8
Significance of the Study ...8
Scope of the Study ...9
Research Design...9
Data Collection ...10
Results and Discussion ...10
Conclusions ...14
Acknowledgment ...15
List of Tables
Table 1, Categories of Word Combination ...2
Table 2, Example of Free Combination ...4
Table 3, Example of Collocations ...5
Table 4, Free Combination vs. Collocation vs. Idioms ...7
Table 5, The Exact Quantity of Word Combination Used in Agatha Christie novel, The Pala Horse ...10
Table 6, Lexical Collocations From Chapter 1 of Agatha Christie novel, The Pale Horse ...11
Table 7, Free Combination From Chapter 1 of Agatha Christie novel, The Pale Horse ...12
Table 8, Idioms From Chapter 1 of Agatha Christie novel, The Pale Horse ...13
List of Figures
A Study on Word Combinations used in Agatha Christie Novel, “The Pale Horse”
Grace Maytri Haryono
Abstract
This study presents word combinations based on Benson categorization, which are free combinations, collocations, idioms, and compounds used in chapter one of Agatha Christie novel, The Pale Horse. The purpose of this study is to find out the most frequent word combinations used and relate them to with Christie’s writing style. The result of this study shows that the most frequent word combinations used in this novel is collocation and for the writing style, Agatha Christie sometime tend to use uncommon words and phrase to make the language of her novel more interesting.
Key Words
Keywords : word combinations, free combinations, collocations, idioms, compounds.
Introduction
“Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest
study” –Aldous Huxley- (1894-1963). That is a magnificent quotation from the famous
English novelist which represents how words can be very important and crucial in people‟s lives. There is no day without words. People use words in many different ways and thus of words leads to different interpretations towards another word.
When a person reads a word or a sentence, a number of processes will occur. The person must recognize the word, then identify its meaning, and when reading a sentence they have to combine the word into the meaning of the sentence. These processes also happen when we read and try to comprehend a novel. One of the problems is one word can have more than one meaning depending on the combination with other words, which is called its word combinations. Take for example, the word “run” in “he runs” and in the word “run businesses” have a big difference in meaning. “Run”in first phrase means “to move with
Scholars further classify word combinations into free combination, collocations, idioms, and compounds. Some word combinations do not have literal meaning and therefore a reader may misunderstand the text. For example, students who learn English as a
second/foreign language may not know the meaning of “to bury the hatchet” which is to reconcile. Similarly, the word combination in “Bella is in hot water”, whichmeans “Bella is to be in trouble”. People may incorrectly believe that Bella is literally submerged. It shows
that it is very important for students to familiarize themselves with word combinations, so that they can successfully comprehend the entire meaning of text (Dews, et al, 1996).
Knowledge of word combination is also crucial in order to construct natural – sounding texts, both oral and written. With this in mind, I have chosen word combinations as the subject of my study.
For this purpose I have selected Agatha Christie‟s nove„The Pale Horse‟ for the source of my data to show the extent of word combinations more fully since it can be
Word Combinations
Benson (1986) and Howarth (1998) have the same concept of word combinations which is related to the possibility of different words to appear together in the text. Although using different labels, they represent very similar sets of categories such as free
combinations, collocations, idioms and compounds as shown in table 1. (Table 1)
Categorizes of Word Combination
Howarth (1998) Benson (1986)
Free combinations
The meaning of free combinations derives from the literal meaning of individual elements.
Ex: drink milk, wash hair, eat candy
Free combinations
Their components are the freest in regard to being combined with other lexical items. Ex: write letter, read a book
Restricted collocations
It is more limited in the selection of
compositional elements and usually has one component used in specialized context. Ex: keep the change, get angry, go crazy
Collocations
Loosely fixedword combinations and the meanings are close to their components part. Ex: close attention, pure chance, to commit a murder
Figurative idioms
It has a metaphorical meaning as a whole that can somehow not represent literal
interpretation.
Ex: do a U turn, break a leg, break the ice
Idioms
Frozen expression whose meanings do not reflect the meanings of their component parts.
Ex: to kill two birds with one stone, to kick the bucket
Pure idioms
It is a single unit whose meaning is totally unpredictable from the meaning of its components.
Ex: blow the gaff, as easy as pie
Compounds
The most fixed word combinations,
completely frozen and no variants at all are possible.
Ex: floppy disk, break through
From table 1 we can see that eventhough Howarth and Benson use different way to explain each of word combinations, they actually have the same concept and it can be used to complement each other. The main difference between them is in compounds and idioms. Benson mentions “compounds” as one of word combinations while Howarth does not
For this study I will focus on Benson‟s theory of word combination and add some
additional theories from other researcher, such as Shin & Nation (2012), Sapientiae (2010), Berkowitz (2009), Mckeown & Radev (1999) who have the same concept with Benson. To clarify Benson‟s theory about word combinations, I will explain each of them and give some example.
Free Combination
The first type of word combinations is free combination. Free combination is the freest combination of words and it means that this combination has the highest degree of the possibility of different words to appear together. Example of free combination are provided in table 2 below.
Table 2
Example of Free Combination
drink drink milk, drink tea, drink water, drink beer, drink coffee, drink wine
eat eat a bananas, eat a candies, eat a rice, eat an apple, eat a cupcake, eat a burger
wash wash hair, wash dishes, wash cloth,
read read a newspaper, read a novel, read a book, read a journal, read a bible, read a magazine
From table 2 we can see that in free combination, one word can be used with many other words and the meaning of free combination can be seen literally or from the meaning of each word.
Collocations
The second type of word combination is collocations. Collocation is used to refer to a group of two or more words that occur frequently together. According to Benson (1986), collocation is divided into Grammatical Collocation and Lexical Collocation.
preposition, etc). Some examples of grammatical collocations are “at the moment”, “across the sky”, “at the end”, “looked into”, and “pushed back”.
While lexical collocation is defined in contrast to grammatical collocation as normally not containing prepositions, infinitives or clause and typically consisting of noun, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. Some examples of lexical collocations are “take note”, “hot bath”, “walk heavily”, and “take place”.
Meanwhile, in this study I will focus more on lexical than grammatical collocations because the later is kind of representation grammar rules (e.g: how to use prepositions correctly).
. Benson (1986) stated that collocation is part of word combinations which is more limited to the selection of the combination of the words. It means that one word has less possibility to appear together than free combinations. This is one of the differences between collocations and free word combinations, we can not mix and match collocations as free as free combinations. Some example of collocations can be seen in table 3 below.
Table 3
The problem that often occurs in defining collocations is the difficulties in which word combinations can be acceptable as collocations (Mckeown & Radev, 1999). The huge number of collocations makes them harder to learn but learning a collocation is never useless because it is an efficient way to improve language fluency and native like selection of
Shin & Nation (2012) elaborating Benson‟s (1986) theory stated that collocation is made up of two parts. The first is a pivot word which is the main word in the collocation, while the second is the word/words accompanying the pivot word. A pivot word has to be a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. The word “high”, for example can become a collocation like “high school, high court, so high, toohigh”. The pivot word from this list of collocations is “high” and the collocates of the pivot word are “school, court, so, to”.
Idioms
The third type of word combinations is idioms. From the linguistic perspective, idioms are groups of words that frequently occurred together (collocations). Idioms can also be seen as a type of collocations, but the collocations in idioms are frozen. The relationship between free combination, collocation, and idiom based on their degree of combination flexibility is illustrated in figure 1 below.
Figure 1
(The Relationship between Free Combinations, Collocations, Idioms (Benson, 1986)
Idioms can be explained as a collocated verb phrase that must be interpreted
figuratively (Sapientiae, 2010). So the main difference between idioms and collocations is the fact that idioms must be interpreted figuratively while collocations can still be interpreted
Free Combinations
Collocations
literally. “To drive a car” is a collocation because these words frequently occurre together but it is non idiomatic, because each word can be interpreted literally. In contrast “drive me a crazy”, is also a collocation but idiomatic or has a figurative meaning, because it cannot be
interpreted literally, so this phrase can be included as a idiom. More examples of the distinction between free combinations, collocations, and idioms can be seen in Table 4.
Table 4
Free Combinations vs. Collocations vs. Idioms ((Mckeown & Radev, 1999)
Free Combinations Collocations Idioms
to take the bus to trade actively to kick the bucket the end of the road table of contents dead end
to buy a house to drive a car drive me crazy
A common problem when dealing with some idioms is they can lead to ambiguous interpretation ((Mckeown & Radev, 1999). Idioms may be interpreted differently depending on readers‟ familiarity with the idiom (Sapinetiae, 2010). For example, the idiom “break the ice”, can be interpreted as break a piece of ice or figuratively initiate social contact
with a stranger. However, there are also idioms which obviously have figurative meanings, for example “to scream blue murder” is unambiguous and only can be interpreted figuratively which is to complain very loudly. One way to solve this problem is to learn many kinds of idioms because an idiom is a fixed expression and cannot be interpreted literally. Hence we need to memorize it.
Compounds
The last type of word combinations is compounds. A compound is the most fixed word combination and it is completely frozen and has no variants at all. A compound is also a lexical element of more than one word (Benson, 1986). It means that the meaning of
1. The closed form, in which the words are blending together, such as “firefly”, secondhand”, “softball”, “childlike”, “redhead”, “makeup”, “notebook”.
2. The hyphenated form, such as “daughter – in –law”, “mass – produced”, “six –pack”.
3. The open form, such as “post office”, “real estate”, “full moon”, “middle class”.
Statement the Problem
The main problem of this study will be how to identify word combinations (free combinations, collocations, idioms, and compound) which are used in Agatha Christie‟s novel, The Pale Horse.
Research Question
The research question in this study is what are the most frequent word combinations
used in chapter one Agatha Christie‟s novel, The Pala Horse?
Purpose of the Study
The main purposes of this study are:
1. To show the most frequent word combination used in chapter one Agatha Christie‟s novel; The Pale Horse.
2. To show the most common free combination word used in chapter one Agatha Christie‟s novel, The Pale Horse.
3. To help students become more aware of a word combinations especially collocations and idioms so that they can apply them in their daily life or language learning context.
Significance of the Study
realizing what they actually are. Because word combinations are used extensively and by different people, this study is significant for many parties. First, for me who is interested in linguistic application, it will enhance my understanding of word combinations. For students who are also interested in Applied Linguistics, this study provides an example of word combinations taken from Agatha Christie‟s novel, The Pale Horse. After reading this study, I hope that the students will be more aware of word combinations especially collocations and idioms so that they can apply them accordingly in their daily life or language learning context. I believe that most students have used word combinations in their writing or
speaking activities without realizing about what they are actually are. This study is hoped to enhance their awareness of word combinations and how to use them correctly. They might be able to develop their own stylistic choice of word combinations, using different variants appropriately. Finally, this study will provide future researchers with references relate to word combinations.
Scope of the Study
This study focuses on word combinations used in Agatha Christie‟s novel, The Pale Horse, which was first published in UK in 1961 and in Indonesia in 1985. It has been so popular that it was reprinted in 2012. I will take several examples of free combinations, lexical collocations, compounds, and idioms, and then analyze it based on the theory already stated in the introduction.
Research Design
I chose this method, because this research is concerned with the collocation of words, phrases, sentences without using any samples or numbers and characteristics of descriptive qualitative research could be found in the process of data gathering.
Data Collection
The data of this study was taken from the Agatha Christie novel, “The Pale Horse”.
In collecting the data, I gathered the data required through the following steps. First, I read the first chapter of the novel. And then I identified words, phrases, and sentences which can be classified as word combinations. Next, I categorized the word combination whether they belong to free combinations, collocations, idioms, or compounds and finally I would make the conclusions from the whole data collection.
Results and Discussion
From chapter one of Agatha Christie‟s novel, „The Pala Horse”, I found some word combinations which can be divided into free combinations, collocations, idioms, and
compounds. The exact quantity of word combinations used in this novel can be seen in table 5 below.
Table 5
The Exact Quantity of Word Combination Used in Agatha Christie novel, the Pale Horse
Type of Word Combination Quantity
Lexical Collocations 46 (43, 8%)
Free Combination 26 (24, 77%)
Compounds 25 (23.81%)
Idioms 8 (7.62 %)
TOTAL of Word Combination 105
often occur together, which shows how natural Christie‟s style is. The complete lexical collocations used in this novel are listed in table 6.
Table 6 Lexical Collocation
From Chapter 1 of Agatha Christie novel, the Pale Horse Lexical Collocations
firmly associated various pages
smelled pleasant absolutely right
uniformly bad a long time ago
rhymed couplet without favor
winding road some such name
poor weapons strange business
inevitably prevail completely indifferent
descending cast looked round
inner sensations took note
early memories a few weeks ago
infernal powers slow menacing rumble
hopeful platitudes all through
achieve simplicity live abroad
late opponent so much
whole street graceful folds
inadequate looking each other
real sports false amnesty
regulation words stinking rich
set forth slummy room
heavy road transport certain evening
particular evening most evening
every other way poorly written
dressed up pretty bad
Some of them ar very common lexical collocations, such as „various pages‟, „each other‟, „so much‟, „live abroad‟, „all through‟, „absolutely right‟, „a long time ago‟, and „took
note‟. I believe that we often hear, read, and use that kind if collocation. Even for less
common lexical collocation, such as „infernal powers‟, „graceful folds‟, „inevitably prevail‟, and „descending cast‟ can still be acceptable for intermediate students who learn English as a
The second word combinations that are often used in this novel is free combinations. Main typical free combinations are the mixing with of different words freely. The examples are cited in Table 7.
Table 7 Free Combinations
From Chapter 1 of Agatha Christie’s novel, the Pale Horse Free Combinations
dying woman woolen stocking
writing narrative unwashed hair
angry snake very attractive
angry scream Indian women
very foundation black hair
dangerous world bright colors
furnished flat young women
writing a book young men
small remnant without avail
red light red hair
red tights rather dark
cup of coffee young people
coffee bars black skirt
There are twenty six free combinations used in chapter one of this novel. The main reason why all of these words in table 5 all free combinations because the meaning of these phrases can be seen from literal meaning of each word (Benson, 1986). A free combination is the easiest word combination to understand because we do not need to interpret the meaning. Most students learn English as a foreign language will not find problems with free
combinations, because they can directly search the meaning of the phrase from the dictionary. Although free combination is the freest of word combinations, there are still semantic constraints for capability (Gelbukh, et.al, 2004). For example, from table 7:
„dying‟ is combining with „women‟
‟Dying‟ is an adjective and it has to combine with something life like human, animals, or
The next discussion is about idiom. Mostly novels, poetry, or another type of literary text will use idioms. Idiom is a kind of tools to make a pretty language, so it will never be useless to apply, even in effort to learn English as a foreign language. The idioms that I found in this novel can be seen in table 8.
Table 8 Idioms
From Chapter 1 of Agatha Christie novel, the Pale Horse
Idioms Meanings
offbeat generation people who have eccentric way of life throw her into hot bath force someone to take a bath with hot water
a cake of soap a big size of soap
break it up to put an end to something
in a minute not exactly in one, two, or three minutes but a several minutes (not too long either)
a bit of fun small amount of fun
kick out of living to enjoy living very much.
Table 8 shows that idioms must be interpreted figuratively, as each word cannot be interpreted literally. For students who study English as foreign language, the meanings of idioms sometimes really do not make any sense, because it has to be interpreted far away from the literal meaning of each word. From table 8 we can also see that sometimes Agatha Christie uses uncommon word phrases, such as “a cake of soap”. Instead of the common phrase, “a bar of soap” instead of “a cake of soap”; which makes her language very unique.
Table 9 Compounds
From Chapter 1 of Agatha Christie novel, the Pale Horse
The Closed Form foreword myself dishwashers childhood newspapers
In linguistics, compounds occur when two or more words are joined together to make them one word. Sometime, the meaning of the compound may be very different from the meaning of its component in isolation. For example, taken from table 9, “pressure cookers”, pressure” meanto force something but when compounding with “cookers”, it becomes a
strong metal pot with a tight lid, which cooks food quickly by steam under high temperature (based on thesaurus dictionary).
Conclusion
Each type of word combinations has a different characteristic and some of them can be interpreted literally and some of them have to be interpreted figuratively. Every novel and written literature text must use word combinations which are free combinations, collocations, idioms, and compounds. So word combinations are important to learn in order to comprehend the text that we read, especially the word combinations that need to be interpreted
figuratively. .
From table 5 we can see that the most common word combinations used in this novel is collocations. Most of the collocations are common collocations which are easy to
However, from this study we can learn that in order to comprehend word
combinations especially collocations, idioms, and compounds, we need to pay attention to the meaning of word as a whole phrase, not as an individual part because a lot of students who learn English as a foreign language only pay attention to the meaning of individual word, so they often make a mistake in understanding the right meaning of word combinations.
The high quantity of collocations used in this novel is can be the other reason why we need to learn word combinations because free combinations, collocations, idioms, and compounds are connected one with the other. We have to learn all of these in order to form a better understanding of written language. Learning word combinations is an efficient way to improve the learner‟s language fluency and native like selection of language use.
Acknowledgment
References
Aston, G. (Eds). (2001). Learning with Corpora.CLUEB, Bologna, Italy.
Berkowitz, R., (2009). Recognizing English compounds words: the role of morphological family size. Wesleyan University. 3 – 6.
Cameron, L & Low, G. (Eds). (1999). Research and Applying Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Creswell, J. (2010). Research Design: Pendekatan Kualtitatif, Kuantitatif, & Mixed.
Thousand Oak California.
Farrokh, P. (2012). Raising Awareness of Collocation in ESL/EFL Classroom. Journal of Studies in Education, 4 – 8.
Firth, J. R. (1957). Papers in Linguistic. Oxford University Press.
Gelbukh, A., Sidorov, G., & Young Han, S. (2004). Automatic syntactic analysis for detection of word combination.
Gruyter, W. (1981). Words, Worlds, and Context: New Approaches in Word Semantics.
Berlin, New York. Center for Computing Research, National Polytechnic Institute.
1-5.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1966) Lexis as a Linguistic Level, 57 – 67.
Hanks, P. (2005). Terminology, Phraesology, and Lexicography. Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistic.
Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in Applied Linguistic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kim, S. N., Mistica, M., Baldwin, T. (2007). Extending Sense Collocations in Interpreting
Noun Compounds. University of Melbourne.
Leech, G. (1969). Towards a Semantic Description of English. Indiana University Press. Leferve, C. & McGraw. (1964). Linguistic and the Teaching of Reading. Hill Book
Company.
Lesniewska, J. (2006). Collocations and second language use. University of Cracoviensis.
1 – 5.
Lynott D., & Connell L. (2009). The effect of prosody on conceptual combination. School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, 1107-1109.
McKeown, K., & Radev, D. (1999). Collocations. Department of Computer Science Columbia University, New York. 1 -6.
Minaeva, L. (1996). Word and word combination in ESP. Moscow State University, 1 – 3. Moehkardi, R. R. D., (2002). Grammatical and Lexical English Collocations: Some Possible
Problems to Indonesian Learners of English. Fakultas Ilmu Budaya, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta. 14, 53 – 62.
Moloeng, Lexy J. (2005). Metodologi Penelitian Kualitatif. Bandung: PT Remaja Rosdakarya.
O‟Keeffe, A., Mc Carthy, M., & Carter R. (2007). From Corpus to Classroom. Language Use and Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.
Reeder P. A., Newport E. L., & Aslin R. N. (2010). Novel words in novel contexts: The role of distributional information in form-class category learning. Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, 1-3.
Sincalir, J. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford University Press.
Smith, L. (1987). Discourse Across Culture: Strategies in World Englishes. Prentice Hall International.
Stekauer P., Diaz Negrillo A., & Valera S. (2010). Meaning predictability and conversation.
Safarik University, University of Jaen, 1-6.
Sweetzer, E. (1993). From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Berkum, J. J. A. (2008). Understanding Sentence Context: What brain waves can tell us.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistic and F.C Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 376-378.
Widyatusti, S. (2010). Componential analysis of meaning: Theory and applications.
Yogyakarta State University, 1-15.
Wray, A. (2000). Formulaic Sequences in Second Language Teaching: Principle and Practice. Oxford University Press, 463 – 489.
Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatic. Oxford University Press.
Yule, G. (2006). The Study of Language (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
