Defining collocation: a descriptive lim itation

In an attempt to pinpoint the origin o f collocation in linguistic theory, B artsch (2004) writes:

The first recorded mention o f the term collocation in a distinctly linguistic context listed under the entry for ‘collocation’ in the second edition o f the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 2nd) dates back to a quotation by Harris o f the year 1750:

1750 Harris Hermes ii. iv. Wks (1841) 197 The accusative .. in modem languages .. being subsequent to its verb, in the collocation o f words.

Etymologically, the term goes back to Latin collocat-us, the past participle o f collocare ‘to place side’, from col- {con-) ‘together’ +

locare ‘to place’. (Bartsch 2004: 28)

A lthough ‘collocation’ has been familiar since the pioneering w ork o f Palm er (1938) who was the first to introduce the term in his dictionary, A Grammar o f English Words, Firth (1957) advanced the word ‘collocation’ as a technical term so that ‘meaning by collocation’

has becom e established as one o f his ‘modes o f m eaning’ (Firth 1957: 194). Indeed, Firth is credited with ‘channelling the attention o f linguists towards lexis’ (H alliday and M cIntosh 1966: 14) in general, and for technically proposing the term ‘collocation’ in particular. Firth said: ‘I propose to bring forward as a technical term, meaning by collocation, and to apply the test o f collocability' (1957: 194).

It should be noted that the Firthian ‘com pany-keeping’ principle o f collocation has been remarkably influential since 1957. When Filth declared the assum ption that ‘you shall know a word by the company it keeps’ (1957: 179), scholarly attention gravitated towards the psychological aspect o f collocation. This can easily be traced in L eech’s elaboration on

collocative m eaning’ as consisting o f ‘the associations a word acquires on account o f the meanings o f words which tend to occur in its environm ent’ (Leech 1974: 20). A similar vision can be readily recognized in the w ay that both Halliday and Hasan (1976) refer to collocation as nothing but a cohesive device: ‘a cover term for the kind o f cohesion that results from the co-occurrence o f lexical items that are in some way or other typically associated with one another, because they tend to occur in similar environm ents’ (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 287). The problem with such psychology-based definitions is that they tend to isolate the idea o f collocability from the social context o f discourse, as if it were a mere cognitive practice. Words, in this case, are associated in the mind on the strength o f regular encounter in similar textual contexts.

On the other hand, there are text-bound definitions o f collocation. One clear instance o f this approach is adopted by Sinclair (1991). He has defined collocation as ‘the occurrence o f two or m ore words within a short space o f each other in a text’ (Sinclair 1991: 170). The second textually oriented approach towards collocation has been introduced in a corpus- linguistics study by Stubbs (2001). Stubbs discusses collocation in term s o f a formal node­

span relation that can be frequently realized in corpora:

A ‘node’ is the word-form or lemma being investigated. A ‘collocate’ is a word-form or lemma which co-occurs w ith a node in a corpus. Usually it is frequent co-occurrences which are o f interest, and corpus linguistics is based on the assumption that events which are frequent are significant. M y definition is therefore a statistical one: ‘collocation’ is frequent co-occurrence.

(Stubbs 2 001:29)

It should be noted that Stubbs’ definition o f collocation is useful in two respects. First, it offers a rigorous quantitative basis for defining collocability in various corpora. Second, the formal device o f the ‘node’ and its collocating ‘span’ is a convenient way o f looking at how

-34-words are collocationally strung in text. (In the next chapter this point will be meticulously tackled.)

Still, however, text-based definitions of collocations render the phenom enon purely mechanical and ready-made, which is not permanently the case. This can be explained in light o f the semantic constraints often imposed on the text-based definitions o f collocation.

It can be argued that semantics alone cannot explain the nature o f collocation, at least in English. This can be vindicated by Firth (1957), who differentiates between cognitive and semantic approaches to word-meaning on the one hand, and the linguistic feature o f collocation on the other: ‘Meaning by collocation is an abstraction at the syntagmatic level and is not directly concerned with the conceptual or idea approach to the m eaning o f words.

One o f the meanings o f night is its collocability with dark, and o f dark, o f course, collocation w ith n ig h f (Firth 1957: 196). This can also be vindicated by Halliday and H asan’s argument about the meaning o f collocating pairs, which, in their judgm ent, is not easy to ‘classify in systematic semantic term s’ (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 286). Also, this can be clear from Palm er’s (1981: 79) concept of ‘collocational restrictions’: (1) some being w holly based on the item meaning (it is certainly unlikely that someone will read or hear expressions like

‘black apples' or ‘The rhododendron passed aM>ay')\ (2) some are ‘quintessential^

collocational’, or collocational in the strictest sense, regardless o f meaning or range (such as

‘addled brains' and ‘sour milk,').

In fact, Lyons (1995: 62) argues against the hypothesis that the collocational range o f an expression is wholly determined by its meaning, so that synonyms ‘m ust o f necessity have the same collocational range’. The example he deploys in explaining this point is that o f big and large. Lyons makes clear m any contexts where ‘large' cannot be substituted for ‘big' without ‘violating the collocational restrictions o f the one or the other’. The sentence example

he offers is ‘you are m aking a big mistake’; in no way is ‘large’ interchangeable with ‘b ig \ While it is true that ‘you are making a large m istake’ is presumably both gramm atically well- formed and meaningful, it is collocationally unacceptable (or ‘unidiom atic’). However, taking a closer look at another context shows that there is allowance for interchangeability within the same collocational range in the light o f potential synonymy between big and large.

For instance, the phrase a big institute could unproblematically be w ritten as a large institute.

D rawing solely on semantic grounds for explaining collocability could quite often bring in m isguided generalizations. For Stillar (1998: 51), collocation involves ‘setting expectations’, which in his terms means: ‘The presence o f a particular item creates a greater than random chance that a related item will occur’. A m om ent’s reflection will reveal two important facts about Stillar’s view o f collocation. First, the basic elem ent o f the collocating process consists o f the way that certain (lexical) expectations may b e set. Second, to Stillar (ibid.), collocation is nothing but a property o f language as a system, not as a social practice.

It seems that such a reductionist formulation o f collocation m ay lead us to think that collocation is some kind o f a linear expectation, and that the restrictively expected linear co­

occurrence is encapsulated within a ‘syntagmatic relation’. Even i f one allows for Stubbs’

(2001: 30) reference to the other type of lexical expectation, ‘choice’ (or, more traditionally,

‘paradigmatic relation’), collocability would still be holding only between semantically related words. N ot unproblematically, this precludes the interpretation o f language as a

‘social sem iotics’: ‘a system o f meanings that constitutes the ‘reality’ o f the culture’

(Halliday 2007: 197).