COLLOCATION

Collocation is a noun whose use dates back to 1605 (Merriam-

Webster) and indicates the following: “the act or result of placing or

arranging together; specifically: a noticeable arrangement or conjoining of

linguistic elements (as words)”.

Michael Hoey

21

_{points out that the term collocation, widely attributed to}

Firth (1957), was already being used by the eighteenth century explorer

of language change and language families, Sir William Jones. For all

that, it was Firth that brought its use into the mainstream

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_.

21 _{personal communication.}

22 _{Xiao & McEnery (2006: 105) give a shorter overview and say: “Collocation has been studied} for at least five decades. The word collocation was first used as a technical term by Firth (1957) when he said ‘I propose to bring forward as a technical term, meaning by collocation, and apply the test of collocability’ (Firth 1957: 194).”

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… the concept of collocation, that is, syntagmatic relations between words as such, not between categories. As Firth (1957) puts it: “you shall know a word by the company it keeps … The habitual collocations [of words] are simply the mere word accompaniment.” (Stubbs 1996: 35)

Firth’s diligent and hugely influential student, Halliday, uses the term

collocation liberally in his 1959 work The Language of the Chinese

“Secret History of the Mongols”. This work would become seminal for

Hoey.

Michael Hoey updated the definition to make it more specific:

The statistical definition of collocation is that it is the relationship a lexical item has with items that appear with greater than random probability in its (textual) context. (Hoey 1991: 6f)

This is clearer and closer to the mathematical definition of the term, as it

excludes co-occurrence – the instances where words happened to occur in

close proximity of each other but at random and without the formulation

of a pattern.

Sinclair, like Kjellmer (1984), Stubbs (1996) and Biber et al. (1998) as

well as many other corpus linguists, describes collocation as a

phenomenon observable in language and made visible in concordances.

Sinclair and Stubbs keep on pointing out that more often than not,

concordances make collocations visible that would not have been found by

simply relying on intuition

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_.

23 _{Cf. Sinclair (1991: 112) The commonest meanings of the commonest words are not the meanings} supplied by introspection. Or Stubbs (1995:381) Often, a corpus will reveal a use of a word which is obvious once it has been seen, but which did not occur to one’s intuition. Also, Louw (1993) is an

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The traditional dictionary definition given above is mirrored by the

synonyms that Roget’s Thesaurus suggests: arrangement; assemblage;

location and phrase. The latter is of particular importance, as it hints at

the fact that certain frozen collocations can form a phrase – or idiom.

Sinclair narrows the definition of the term even further. He points out

that that the “idiom principle” grows out of “frozen collocations”:

Tending towards idiomacity is the phraseological tendency, where words tend to go together and make meanings by their combinations. Here is collocation, and other features of idiomaticity. (Italics in original – MPS), (Sinclair [1996] 2004: 29)

Collocations are more than words appearing together in one context. Once

a statistically high frequency of use is established, this can be seen as

more than just a chunk of words but rather as a meaningful cluster that

has “idiomaticity”.

Hoey initially accepted collocation as a term to describe what

Sinclair, he and the others found. It was part of the linguistic landscape

of the day – and he was employing the term in that way still in 1997.

The next step for Hoey was to ask how collocation comes into being. This

is where the pervasive use of collocation starts to become interesting. It is

those linguists who are concerned with how the mind works –

psycholinguists – who actually highlight why there are collocations and

not mere co-occurrences of words. Wray (2002a) points out that

influential article which shows how concordance data on frequent collocation provide observable evidence of pragmatic meanings.

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collocation is a fluid version of formulaicity and highlights that formulaic

blocks appear as part of first language acquisition.

This brings a psychological dimension into the discussion. As

discussed above, psychologists had constructed experiments over the past

decades that prove that human minds connect some words more closely

than others. Our brains appear to link knowledge of how words collocate

with each other with the possibility of cohesion between any two lexical

items. Halliday and Hasan (1976) speak of lexical items that are in one

way or typically associated with each other.

While Hoey (2005) quotes Leech (1974) and Partington (1998) to give

psychological reasons why speakers would collocate, it needs to be said

that this is also highlighted by Halliday and Hasan, using wording oddly

prescient of what Hoey would write in 2005:

Without our being aware of it, each occurrence of a lexical item carries with it its own textual history, a particular collocational environment that has been building up in the course of the creation of the text and that will provide the context within which the item will be incarnated on this particular occasion. (Halliday & Hasan 1976: 289)

This is echoed by Hoey:

The importance of collocation for a theory of the lexicon lies in the fact that at least some sentences … are made up of interlocking collocations such that they could be said to reproduce, albeit with important variations, stretches of earlier sentences. It could be argued that such sentences owe their existence to the collocations they manifest.

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Michael Hoey turns Halliday & Hasan’s argument on its head. It is not

the creation of a text that makes us collocate. We carry, without being

aware of it a template in our heads to collocate certain words, and these

subconsciously recognisable collocates create the sense of cohesion for the

reader:

We can only account for collocation if we assume that every word is mentally primed for collocational use. As a word is acquired through encounters with it in speech and writing, it becomes cumulatively loaded with the contexts and co-texts in which it is encountered, and our knowledge of it includes the fact that it co-occurs with certain other words in certain kinds of context. (author’s highlighting - MPS), (Hoey 2005: 8)

This brings the issue of collocation full circle – from an observed

phenomenon that is statistically more than random and therefore

displaying a pattern that is formed through the exposure to a word in its

specific context. It shows that what we call intuition clearly works on two

levels. If we are asked to name collocations “intuitively” our mind seems

to map language differently, as we come up with what we think are

strong collocates, whether or not these may be statistically of a low

frequency. Our subconscious intuition however produces collocates

without thinking – and these are recorded as our typical language use.

Collocation, therefore, follows a psychological, subconscious process.

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In document Evidence of lexical priming in spoken Liverpool English (Page 42-47)