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Lexical Collocations in the English Sentences: An Overview
Patricia. N. Chiekezie General Studies Department, Federal College of Agriculture, Ishiagu, Ebonyi State, 48010, Nigeria
Abstract
The teaching of grammar to language learners is the most important aspect of language learning. Word collocation is necessary if fluency must be achieved in the use of the English language. This study focuses on the use of lexical collocation in producing English sentences. Two types of collocation were explained: grammatical collocation and lexical collocation. The attention of this study is focused on lexical collocation. Seven classes of lexical collocation were handled. Various sentence examples were used to show the importance of collocation in grammar. The research concludes that the teaching and learning of collocation of words should be given adequate attention in language classrooms.
Keywords: language learner, collocation, lexical, second language, error analysis, grammar.
1. INTRODUCTION
The study of the grammar of the English language has been an important area among second language teachers of the English language. This God- given tool for human communication has been defined in various ways by various linguists.
Knowing a language means knowing the grammar of that language. Weaver’s (2008) emphasizes that “the grammar of a language is its structure, which enables us to communicate whether or not we or anybody else consciously understands that structure”. Alison (2016) supports the above view when he notes that “that grammar involves more than knowing the rules; it is knowing how to use language effectively”.
As Weaver’s words suggest, it is not the goal of grammar instruction to turn students into grammarians, but rather to enable students to communicate effectively, to produce compelling writing. Students should have grammar knowledge on a need-to-know basis: what do they need to know to make their writings interesting and engaging?
What do they need to know to deliver a clear message or to produce the desired effect? Grammar instruction should not be overly preoccupied with error correction; rather it should be concerned with editing and producing skillful writing. In short, grammar
knowledge should help writers write well. Literally, collocation is a term used to address the possibility of occurrence of largely two or more words in lexical or syntactic relations. Although it sounds as if it was a recent and fashionable term to the linguistic literature, the importance of collocation to foreign language learners was mentioned long before any other linguistic components and terms emerged.
Collocations are essential in a variety of ways, one of which is the lexical contribution that it provides to the authors; again, it enables language learners to know words that can co-occur. Recently, some studies have created a strong and established link between lexical diversity and collocation knowledge (for example see Laufer, 2003), which further enabled and gave the opportunity for authors to strive for academic writings. (For example, Hyland, 2008; Durrant, 2009 to mention a few). That important link between lexical diversity and collocation has led many studies to investigate collocations that are used in academic texts by authors consciously or unconsciously. The common results indicated that collocations have been widely employed to the most Basic English courses to the extreme of English proficiency levels (Oben &
Ajimase 2011; Igbineweka & Egbai 2017). There is nearly no way of using a language without referring
to collocations because they are intricately interwoven with the language itself. That is why there is an extreme chance of encountering collocations whether you are a reader, speaker, or writer. The frequency of occurrence of collocations does not make it an apparent issue for the language producers. In contrast, it is an intricate issue requiring a huge amount of attention.
The very first reason that makes collocations so indispensable for academic scholars lies behind the absolute power of collocation that allows a potential native-like written production because native speakers of English use “readymade chunks” (Robins, 1967, p. 21), it is evident that many non-native writers aspire to have native-like written productions, which would be impossible or at least too onerous since they have insufficient collocational knowledge. In order not to create scientific papers filled with odd expressions, authors or language teachers must be aware of the collocations that native writers of English use in their texts. The effect of that would be language inappropriateness, stylistic default, and foreignness to native readers. Fox (1998) reports that the fundamental challenge regarding academic writing full of odd expressions is wrong collocations.
Adequate use of collocation in writing is a painstaking issue for even very proficient non-native writers. Literature has proved that wrong use of collocation could result in an error type called collocation error (Oben 2011; Ude & Oben 2015;
Chiekezie, 2019).
Undoubtedly, these troublesome errors disrupt the transmission of knowledge to learners or readers.
The study of collocation of words must be considered paramount if fluency must be achieved in the second language (L2) teaching and learning (Sung, 2003).
Nation (1990), emphasizes that low proficiency learners have the tendency of “encoding words in memory based on sound and spelling rather than by association of meanings”. The situation is not distinct for non-native writers. A dearth of collocational proficiency is associated with the lexical proficiency of L2 learners and writers. In addition, Ellis (1996) points out that knowledge of collocations agrees with lexical development. One of the reasons non-native speakers or writers do not use collocations as proficient as native speakers or writers is because they fail to correlate words on the basis of true and specific word partnership (Sung, 2003)..
2. THE TRANSFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR (TGG)
In 1957, Chomsky came up with the theory of transformational generative grammar to devise a grammatical system that would “cover the entire language directly by repeated application of a rather simple set of transformations (Naeem 2016, p. 14). In TGG, the major concern is the native speakers’
competence which Chomsky describes as “the speakers’ tacit knowledge of their language” (Naeem 2016:5). He believes that language is mentalistic, and that language is a system that relates meaning to things (Igbeaku, 2014, p. 29) In TGG, syntactic relations are established among constructions through the use of transformational rules. So, the surface structure is more complicated "being an elaboration of one or more underlying simple structures (Cattel 2006, p. 10). One of the important features of transformational generative grammar which owes credence to its name is the potential of the grammar to
"generate" accurate sentences. So, language was seen as a kind of brain property, since it is in the mind of the speaker (Behzadi, 2010, p. 3).
Every language learner or speaker has the grammar of the language in his mind and must be able to combine words accurately to produce novel sentences. Since the inception of TGG, various models of TGG have emerged: Chomsky, since 1957 has presented various models of grammar. They are: The Standard Theory model (1957 – 1965); The Extended Standard Theory (1965 – 1973); The Revised Extended Standard Theory (1973 – 1976); The Government and Binding Theory (1981 – 1990) and the Minimalist Programme. This theory is relevant to this study because collocation is focused on language form and usage. One of the tools used by TGG in language learning and teaching is error analysis. It was initiated by Pit Corder and his colleagues in 1967. In his seminal paper in 1967 "The significance of learners' errors", he emphasized the learners' positive cognitive contribution to learning. He sees the learner's error as
"the discrepancy between the transitional competence of that learner and the target language" (Lennon 2008, p. 54). Corder’s “transitional competence” indicates the essential dynamism and influx of the language learners’ evolving system. He believes that errors are mandatory and unavoidable for learners because making errors can be regarded as a device the learner uses to learn (Zarei and Mansoori, 2011, p. 51). Corder (1967, p. 166) defines, error analysis as “a type of linguistic analysis concentrating on the errors learners
make in the process of language learning and comparing the errors made in the target language (TL) with the target language itself.” Errors help in the teaching and learning of the correct form
3. COLLOCATION DEFINED
The idea of "Collocations" was introduced by Firth for the first time in 1957. The word "collocation"
emerged from the argument that some word combinations are so tightly bound or lexicalized that they behave as if they were single items. Since 1957, the teaching of collocations has been largely neglected (Shei and Helen, 2000, p. 185). Although the knowledge of collocation is said to be an important aspect of achieving native-like competence in foreign language learning, sufficient attention has been paid to its teaching, neither in traditional methodologies nor in modern approaches to foreign language teaching. It was in 1993 that Lewis moved the teaching of collocations to the forefront of language teaching in his language teaching approach called "the lexical approach". Lewis (1997) argues that focus on collocations provides a more practical approach to language teaching than grammar. He emphasizes that collocation patterns account for some of the variability not captured in the rules of grammar.
Many L2 researchers and teachers have defined collocations in different ways:
Benson (1990, p. 25) defines collocation as
“the occurrence of two or more words within a short span of each other.” Benson, Benson and Ilson (1997, in Jafarpour and Koosha, 2005; 6) define collocation as
"…specified, identifiable, non-idiomatic recurrent combinations". Sinclair (1991, cited in Kim, 2009, p. 9) and Stubbs (1995, p. 24) define collocation as "… the characteristics co-occurrence of patterns of words".
Firth (1964:5) emphasizes that the "…collocations of a given word are the statements of the habitual or customary place of the word." McCarthy (1990, in Jafarpour and Koosha, 2005, p. 6) defines collocation as “…a marriage contract between words.” The above definitions of collocations portray the fact that collocations refer to the syntagmatic relations of words.
4. TYPOLOGY OF COLLOCATIONS
Benson, Benson and Ilson (1997 in Kim, 2009:9) classified collocations into two groups on the basis of word classes. They are: grammatical collocations and lexical collocations. Grammatical collocations are made up of the main word (a noun,
an adjective, or a verb), plus a preposition or a grammatical structure, such as "to + infinitive" or
"that-clause". They isolated eight basic types of collocations. Lexical collocation comprises content words only. They include: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Prepositions, infinitives and clauses are not included. Benson et al (1997), gave six classifications of lexical collocations.
Pawley and Syder (1983, p. 7) opine that collocations are made up of recurring word combinations at the phrase, clause and sentence levels. Any attempt to present collocational patterns that are ungrammatical results in error.
4.1 Lexical collocations in the English language Benson, Benson, and Ilson (1997) classification of lexical classification is used in this study. They are:
1. Verb + Noun.
Examples are:
a. .His actions attracted Police attention(attract attention).
b. The Lawyer gave insight into the matter (gave insight).
c. The Engineer developed an idea that manufactured the engine. (developed idea).
d. The student made five suggestions (make suggestions).
e.The officer lacked access to his office. (lack access).
2.Adjective + Noun
a. The Doctor advised the patient to do regular exercise for his health (Regular exercise).
b. There was a steady flow of ideas in the conference (Steady flow).
c. The winner had an additional benefit of a free trip to Dubai (Additional benefit).
d. Monkeys have a unique nature (Unique nature).
e. The meeting was a big failure (Big failure).
3. Noun + Verb
a. The survey reveals that snails die a lot in dry seasons (survey reveals).
b. The test results indicate that she is pregnant (results indicate).
c. Jane’s research findings suggest that corns grow more in rainy seasons (findings suggest).
d. The bomb blast killed five hundred men (bomb blast).
e. The Doctor’s analyses include urine examination (analyses include).
4. Noun 1 + Noun 2
a. The Lion saw a flock of Sheep and pursued them (flock of Sheep).
b. American government had a trade agreement with Nigeria (trade agreement).
c. The Principal lost his bunch of keys (bunch of keys).
d. I saw a gang of robbers on the highway (gang of robbers).
e. The Seamstress brought our company's uniform (company uniform).
5. Adverb + Adjective
a. It is widely believed that birds lay eggs (widely believed).
b. Matching on that plastic plate was an utterly appalling thing to do (utterly appalled).
c. The boy is closely acquainted with the robber (closely acquainted).
d. The baby was sound asleep on a Dunlop. (sound asleep)
e. The teacher asked the students for strictly accurate answers (strictly accurate).
6. Verb + Adverb
a. Mary acted rashly towards the husband (act rashly).
b. The man appreciated sincerely the honour given to him at the ceremony (appreciate sincerely).
c. Mary laughed loudly at the man's foolishness (laughed loudly).
d. The governor spoke foolishly in the conference (spoke foolishly).
Any deviation in the use f lexica collocations results in an error.
The seventh lexical collocation that Benson et al (1997) did not mention is Adverb and verb.
7. Adverb + Verb
a. The couple vigorously debated on the issue (vigorously debated)
b. The students were advised to carefully listen to instructions (carefully listen).
c. Mary was angry, so, she seriously confronted the Policeman for the unlawful arrest (seriously confronted).
d. The widely cited proverb manifested in Jane's attitude yesterday (widely cited).
e. Her statements simply showed that she stole the money (simply showed).
5. CONCLUSION
The above study shows that lexical collocation is very important in the learning and use of the English language. Every second language learner aspires to approximate the native speakers’
competence. It has been noted that wrong use of collocation results in collocation error which is a grammatical error. Therefore adequate attention should be given to the teaching, learning and use of collocational patterns in the English language.
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