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. Even so, definitions differ. The linguist who invented the term, J. R Firth, holds that collocation is to be defined by a repetitive combination of semantically related words.

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.