Collocation

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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.