2011-12 LINGUA INGLESE 1 modulo A/BIntroduction to English Linguisticsprof. Hugo Bowles

Lesson 16

Lexical semantics 2 (collocation)

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Friday and Saturday

Venerdi 2 Dicembre: Self-access Intonation

Sabato 3 Dicembre Revision and Mock exam

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Why do you say deep water and not profound water?

“A word is known by the company it keeps” (JR Firth)

There is no definable reason why we choose to say “deep water” but not “profound water”. It is simply a question of COLLOCATION.

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What is collocation?

COLLOCATION refers to a relationship between words that frequently occur together

The words together can mean more than the sum of their parts (hot dog)

- other examples: mother in law Examples of collocations

noun phrases like strong coffee and weapons of mass destruction phrasal verbs like to make up, and other phrases like the rich and

powerful. Valid or invalid?

a stiff breeze but not a stiff wind (while either a strong breeze or a strong wind is okay).

Broad/bright daylight (but not narrow darkness).

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Collocational meaning (1) Collocational meaning refers to the

associations that a word acquires in its collocation:

e.g. girl boy boy woman man pretty flower handsome garden car colour overcoat village

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Collocational meaning (2) A word can gain different collocational meaning in

different contexts:

e.g.green on the job white mangreen fruit white winegreen with envy white noise

white coffee

These different meanings of “green” and “white”arepolysemous but they are caused by the differentcollocation, i.e. the change in verbal context

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Criteria for collocations Typical criteria for collocations:

- non-compositionality - non-substitutability - non-modifiability.

Collocations usually cannot be translated into other languages word by word.

A phrase can be a collocation even if it is not consecutive (as in the example knock .. door).

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Non-compositionality

A phrase is compositional if the meaning can predicted from the meaning of the parts. e.g. new companies

A phrase is non-compositional if the meaning cannot be predicted from the meaning of the parts e.g. hot dog

Collocations are not necessarily fully compositional in that there is usually an element of meaning added to the combination. e.g. strong coffee.

Idioms are the most extreme examples of non-compositionality. e.g. once in a blue moon.

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Non-substitutability

We cannot substitute near-synonyms for the components of a collocation. e.g. We can’t say yellow wine instead of white wine even

though yellow is as good a description of the color of white wine as white is (it is kind of a yellowish white).

Many collocations cannot be freely modified with additional lexical material or through grammatical transformations (Non-modifiability). e.g. white wine, but not whiter wine mother in law, but not mother in laws

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Linguistic Subclasses of Collocations

Light verbs: - Verbs with little semantic content like make, take and

do. - e.g. make lunch, take it easy,

Verb particle constructions - e.g. to go down

Proper nouns - e.g. Barack Obama

Terminological expressions refer to concepts and objects in technical domains. - e.g. Hydraulic oil filter

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Collocations at a distance

Many collocations occur at variable distances. For example knock collocates with door but at a distance - she knocked on his door - they knocked at the door - 100 women knocked on Donaldson’s

door - a man knocked on the metal front door

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Finding collocations Software is able to scan texts for the

most frequently collocated words using the criterion of frequency, i.e. by counting the words which most frequently appear together

This usually produces a lot of function words which need to be filtered out

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An example of a frequency count

This shows the most frequent collocations of pairs of words (bigrams) in a corpus of newspaper articles.

The are all function words (except New York)

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Frequency count after filtering

This chart shows the

most frequent collocations

after filtering out the

function words. The

capital letters refer to the

part of speech

(A = Adjective, N = Noun)

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Idioms - characteristics (1)

Idioms are strictly non-compositionalAlthough the word that make up the idiom haveTheir own literal meanings, in the idiom theyhave lost their individual identity. You canotpredict the meaning of an idiom from the sum ofits parts:e.g. how do you do?

I’m under the weather

to wear your heart on your sleevered herring

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Idioms - characteristics (2) Structural stability (syntactic frozenness)

1. Constituents cannot be replacede.g. as good as gold / as good as play ?

2. Constituents cannot be deleted or added toe.g. out of the question / out of question ?

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In which areas of language learning is collocation useful?

Collocation is important at all levels for Writing Translation

You will only be able to write well if you know which words go together.

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How do I learn collocations?

Noticing collocations when you read

Storing collocations: organised lexical notebook

Revising and practicing collocations

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Which collocations should I learn?

Unique collocations (foot the bill, shrug your shoulders) Strong collocations (ulterior motives, rancid butter,

trenchant criticism, to be moved to tears) Medium collocations (to make a mistake, to be recovering

from a major operation) Weak collocations (white wine, red hair, a black mood, a

blue movie)

It is best to learn the strong collocations because they are unusual

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Note down your collocation mistakes

Collocation is mostly about pairings of words so students will often use a mis-collocation, e.g. high house

You should record your written mis-collocations

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Learn extra collocations

Note down the extra collocations you learn in class:

e.g. S: I have to make an examT: what verb do we use with “exam”?S: “take”T: that’s right; other verbs we could use

are “to pass”, “to fail” or also “to

retake”

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Try to extend what you know

Even when you get something right you can extend your collocational knowledge

e.g. S: I was very disappointed

T: You could also say “bitterly” or “deeply” disappointed

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Finding collocations in a text

Underline useful collocations and put them in your notebooks

Read different types of text so you build up your mental lexicons in a balanced way

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Some typical collocation exercises Synonyms: identify words appearing

frequently in similar contexts

“Blast victims were helped by the neighbours” - OK

“Flu victims were helped by the doctors” - OK “ Flu sufferers were helped by doctors” - OK

“Crime victims were helped by the police” – OK “Crime sufferes were helped by the police” Collocations: identify synonyms that don’t

appear in similar contextsFlu victims - OK, flu sufferers – OK

Crime victims - OK, crime sufferers ??

Can I say “crime sufferers”?

The quickest way to find out if two words collocate (i.e. “go together”) is to type them into the “Advanced Search” of Google and see if they are used together and, if so, in what contexts.

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Record and recycle Always write down new collocations in

special notebooks in a systematic order such as recording them in topic groups.

It is important to repeat the content of the notebook in order to acquire it fully (recycling)

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Use special notebooks for collocation Prepare a special lexicon for collocations. It is

helpful to organise it like this:

- do not record more

than five collocates

- use only strong, frequent

collocates

attract

be subject to

criticism deserve

react to

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Learning idioms Since collocations and idioms have a lot

in common they should be learned in a similar way

e.g. identifying of idioms, guessing meaning from context, recording them in notebooks

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Dictionaries The LTP Dictionary of Selected

Collocations Oxford Collocations Dictionary for

Students of English Cambridge International Dictionary of

Idioms Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Idioms Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms

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Concordancing software Tapor freeware (this will give you

concordances of any word in a text)

Wordsmith Tools (excellent but expensive)

Google Google “Advanced Search” is a very

good way of finding out if collocations exist

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