COLLOCATION

Firth introduced the notion of collocations by

:his statement
You shall know a word“
”by the company it keeps
This is a heavy bag rain smoker

heavy

traffic
Collocates are lexemes that
co-occur with each other in natural
.texts
( )
http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsACollocate.htm
collocation )n.( A term used in lexicology by •
some linguists )especially Firthian( to refer to the
habitual co-occurrence of individual lexical items

(. )Crystal 6 edn
,For example
,auspicious collocates with : occasion, event
letter collocates with alphabet, graphic
 Collocations and idioms

we have to differentiate between collocations and

. idioms
Idiom : a term used in grammar and lexicology to refer to a sequence
of words which is semantically and often syntactically restricted, so that
they function as a single unit. From a semantic viewpoint, the meanings of the
individual words cannot be summed to produce the meaning of the idiomatic
expression as a whole. From a syntactic viewpoint, the words often do not
permit the usual variability they display in other contexts, e.g. it’s raining cats
.and dogs does not permit *it’s raining a cat and a dog/dogs and cats, etc

.
Idioms Collocations
to kick the bucket heavy rain
give up make a mistake
Collocates may be characterized as
: follows

Syntactically and semantically permissible. 1

 :Example

There was green grass growing everywhere

Syntactically permissible. 2
but
semantically impermissible
 :Example

There were green ideas growing everywhere

3. Syntactically and semantically
impermissible
'There was green ideas grows everywhere
:Collocate may also be characterized as follow

Syntactically and semantically permissible

, but incidental, as in live metaphor

Example

The barn was painted red like a tomato

‘
Syntactically and semantically permissible, but fixed
in usage, as in dead metaphors
dead metaphor :a word or phrase that has lost its force through common usage / Webster )
\(11 edn

red as a beet' He turned as

 Collocation is not simply a matter of“
association of ideas. For, although milk
is white we should not say white milk
,though the expression white paint is
”common enough
(Palmer(1976: p.76
Although collocation is very largely
determined by meaning, it can not easily
be predicted in terms of the meaning of
associated words
Example: blond with hair
We should not talk about a blond door or
a blond dress
Also : rancid with bacon and butter
milk never collocates with rancid but )
(with sour
Pretty child and buxom neighbor normally refer
to females
Not pretty boy or buxom man
:This is found in the collective words
((denoting a number of persons or things considered as one group or whole

Folk of sheep
Herd of cows
School of whales
 Words may have more specific
meanings in particular collocations
example:
abnormal or exceptional weather
but
an exceptional child is not an
abnormal child
It would be a mistake to attempt to
draw a clear distinguishing line
between those collocations that are
predictable from the meanings of
the words that co-occur and those
that are not
One can with, varying degrees of
plausibility ,provide a semantic
explanation by assigning very
particular meanings to the individual
words
rancid : unpleasant taste associated
with butter
There is some plausibility in
accounting for dogs bark, cats mew
in terms of the kind of noise
made ,since bark can be used of
( other animals (squirrels
Not only is some of the semantic
explanation a little implausible, but
there are other examples where it
would seem totally inappropriate
(herd of cows \ flock of sheep(
the only difference between herd
and flock is that one is used with
cows and the other with sheep
a word will often collocate with a
number of other words that have some
thing in common semantically
 Palmer
individual words or sequences of“
words will not collocate with certain
groups of words. Thus, though we may
say The rhododendron died, we shall
not say The rhododendron passed
away, in spite of the fact that pass
away seems to mean ‘die’.” (1986:78).
This is caused by the restriction on the
use of a particular word with a group of
. words that are semantically related
 Cruse explains the problem by
saying that pass away requires the
grammatical subject to be human
and that’s why it cannot be used
with a shrub
Cruse emphasises the semantic
arbitrariness of the restriction and calls it
collocational restriction. He defines it as
“co-occurrence restrictions that are
irrelevant to truth-conditions
Cruse maintains that collocational restrictions are
not logically necessary; they are not primarily
there to encode part of the message. This fact
was already discussed by Firth who says that
“meaning by collocation is an abstraction at the
syntagmatic level and is not directly concerned
with the conceptual or idea approach to the
”meaning of words
In relation to synonymy, we must not forget about
collocational range and collocational restriction. Lyons
(1995) speaks about collocational range of an
expression, i.e. the set of contexts in which it can occur
He relates it to the condition that two expressions are
absolutely synonymous when “they are synonymous in
all contexts” (1995: 61). Lyons exemplifies his thesis by
big and large. There are many contexts in which these
two expressions cannot be substituted without violating
the collocational restrictions of one or the other
.You are making a big mistake
You are making a large mistake
Palmer (1986) sees three kinds of
: collocations
some are based wholly on the meaning. 1
of the item as in the unlikely green cow.
)semantics
some are based on range – a word. 2
may be used with a whole set of words
that have some semantic features in
common.” This accounts for the
unlikeliness of pretty boy
) pretty is used to denote females (
some restrictions are. 3
collocational in the strictest
sense, involving neither
meaning, nor range” (1986), as
.for example addled eggs
 Adjective + noun a major problem
verb + noun set the table
verb + adverb struggle desperately
Adverb + adjective sound asleep
noun + noun a surge of anger
Verbs + preposition Filled with horror