Chapter 2. Literature Review
2.4 Collocation
Collocation is, put crudely, the property of language whereby two or more words seem to appear frequently in each other’s company. The term has been used and explained in different ways.
2.4.1 Definition of Collocation
The term “collocation” was first brought forth by John Firth, widely accepted as the founder of the concept. Firth (1957, p. 181) observed that “collocations of a given word are statements of the habitual or customary places of that word.” Since
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then, many scholars have defined collocation in many ways. Halliday and Hasan (1976, p. 287) referred to collocation as a cohesive device and described it as “a cover term for the kind of cohesion that results from the co-occurrence of lexical items that are in some way or other typically associated with one another, because they tend to occur in similar environments.” Leech (1974, p. 20) believed that
“collocative meaning consists of the associations a word acquires on account of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its environment.” His opinion was supported by Cruse (1986, p. 40) who saw collocation as sequences of lexical items which occur together habitually.
In 1933, Harold Palmer’s Second Interim Report on English Collocations highlighted the importance of collocation as a key to producing natural-sounding language. Thus from the 1940s onwards, many lexicographers began to place collocation usage in their dictionaries, and with the booming of the large readable corpora in the 21st century, many dictionaries such as the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2002) and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (5th Edition) (Pearson Longman, 2008) included boxes or panels with lists of frequent collocations.
2.4.2 Collocation in Corpus Linguistics
Generally speaking, functional linguistics concentrates on general abstraction about the properties of phrases and sentences. In contrast, corpus linguistics
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emphasizes the importance of context. In this study, under the corpus linguistics orientation, an analysis based on collocation is conducted.
2.4.2.1 Definition of Collocation in Corpus Linguistics
There is general agreement that individual words and their co-occurrences contribute to shaping the meaning of words (Lewis, 1997; Nation, 2001; Schmitt, 2000; Sinclair, 1991). Sinclair, the founder of modern corpus linguistics, defined collocation in much more technical words. Collocation is regarded as “the co- occurrence of two items (node words) within a specified environment (a selected span)” (Sinclair, Jones, & Daley, 2004, p. 10). “The collocational pattern of an item consists of a list of all words appearing significantly often in its environment with information about them” (Sinclair et al., 2004, p. 73). Since then, using corpus linguistics in collocation research has become a trend. Lindquist (2009, p. 57) believed that collocation is the relation between a word and individual word-forms which co-occur frequently with it.
Thus as one of the key types of data that corpora can reveal, through collocation, the meaning of words and their behaviors can be derived. Collocation is concerned with repeated, statistically significant patterns, where words occur together more often than chance alone might dictate. The statistical relationships are calculated on measures of frequency and probability, and various calculations can be used, depending on the type of relationships being explored.
24 2.4.2.2 Collocation vs. Colligation
The difference between “collocation” and “colligation” was first coined by Firth (1957) who believed that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps” (p. 11).
Firth (1957, p. 183) saw colligation as “the interrelation of grammatical categories in syntactical structure” and collocation as “actual words in habitual company”.
Thus, two terms interrelated with each other were introduced. Later, theoretical linguists proposed many different theories to distinguish collocation with colligation. For example, Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992) considered colligation as general classes of collocations, for which at least one construction is specified by category rather than as a distinct lexical item. Tognini-Bonelli (1996, p. 74) defined colligation as interrelations of grammatical categories, which concern categories such as word classes and sentence classes. And with the introduction of corpus linguistics, Sinclair (1996) saw form and meaning as complementary: different senses of a word will characteristically be realized in different structural configurations. According to Sinclair (1996, pp. 80-88), “collocation is a frequent co-occurrence of words; it does not have any profound effect on the individual meanings of the words, but there is usually at least a slight effect on the meaning, if only to select or confirm the meaning appropriate to the collocation, while colligation is the occurrence of grammatical choices to account for the greater variation.” Stubb (2009) further generalized that collocation suggests predictability of word combinations and colligation is one step more abstract than collocation, dealing with the predication of the grammatical classes in the syntactical level.
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2.4.3 Lexical Priming of Collocation in Psychology
The notion of collocation means not only statistically significant co-occurrence with node words (Sinclair et al., 2004), but also psychological reality (Hoey, 2005).
Hoey (2005, p. 7) brought about the idea of “the pervasiveness of collocation” and borrowed the concept of “priming” as discussed in the literature of psychology (e.g., Anderson, 1983; Neely, 1977; Neely, 1991) where the notion of semantic priming was used to discuss the way a “priming” word may provoke a particular
“target” word. Chomsky (1986) distinguished the study of linguistic data, which he termed “E-Language” (externalized language) from “I-Language” (internalized language), the language found in the brains of speakers. Lexical priming was intended as a bridge between the two categories.
As for the synonym, Hoey (2005, p.13) specifically discussed a hypothesis that
“co-hyponyms and synonyms differ with respect to their collocations, semantic associations and colligations.” He also pointed out that corpus linguistics can provide a way of analyzing language. A listener will recognize a word more quickly when a related word is given (i.e., body and heart). Therefore, psychologically speaking, collocation can work as a way to distinguish near- synonyms.
26 2.5 Language Network Analysis