Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

Our Agenda

What is Collocation?
Collocation vs. Colligation
Types of Collocation

What is Corpus Linguistics?

What does CL have to do with

collocation?

Examples.

Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

The idea of collocation was first

introduced by J. R. Firth in 1957.

Collocation is the statistically significant

tendency of two or more words to cooccur together.

It is the habitual association of a word

in a language with other particular
words in sentences. (Robins, 2000, P.
64)

And this appears to have arisen

arbitrarily in the course of language
evolution.

You shall know a word

by the company it keeps.

Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

Strong
wind

Heavy
wind

Heavy
rain

Strong
rain

Strong
tea

Powerful
tea
Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

A distinction is often made between colligation and

collocation.

Colligation concerns the grammatical patterns required

by certain words or types of words, whereas collocation
focuses on lexical items repeatedly co-occurring in
company in the frame of certain grammatical patterns.

For example, the verb enjoy can be used in V+ Doing

and V + Noun patterns

Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

verb + noun
compose music; make an impression;

verb +noun
revoke a license; demolish a house

adjective + noun
strong tea; a rough estimate

noun + verb
bees buzz; bombs explode

noun1 of noun2
pack of dogs; a herd of buffalo

adjective + adverb/ adverb + adjective

sound asleep; hopelessly addicted

verb + adverb
argue heatedly
Lexical Collocations (Adopted from Benson et al., 1986)
Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

The term corpus first appeared

in the early 1980s.

There are many ways to define a

corpus, but there is a growing
consensus that a corpus is a
collection of machine readable
authentic texts or transcripts
which is sampled to be a
representative of a particular
language or language variety.

Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

It is debatable whether CL is a methodology or a branch

of linguistics.

CL can be considered as a methodology with a wide

range of applications across many areas and theories of
linguistics.

Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

Corpora give a very good insight into collocations.

Corpora show us the preferred way of putting things

and thus provide an insight into native-like selection.

Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

The concordancer can do more than just list the examples

randomly. Programs such as WordSmith Tools or AntConc can
re-sort the context (either to the left or to the right of the node)
so that it is possible to look for patterns and regularities in the
use of a certain word.

Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

The BNC is a balanced synchronic text corpus containing

100 million words annotated with parts of speech.

BNC Interface, http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/

Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

Verb + Noun reach + agreement

2

Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

Noun + Verb
Adjective + Noun
Adverb + Adjective

Bomb + explode (117)

Excruciating + pain (17)
Uncanny + resemblance (19)
Fully + aware (239)

Verb + Adverb

Clearly, vividly, vaguely + remember (20, 19, 18)

Noun + Noun

Ceasefire + agreement (53)

Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014

Alaa Riad & Shaimaa Suleiman

11/4/2014