ON COLLOCATIONS IN ENGLISH

Abstract

In other words, collocational patterns form the core of word knowledge and increasing the learners' collocational competence is the way to improve their language as a whole. [...]learning collocations not only increases the mental lexicon but develops fluency as well. What is more, if a word has several collocations, they are listed in a box at the end of the entry, as illustrated by the following example (Mayor 2009:506): Doubt: Verbs: have doubts, have your doubts, have no/little doubt, leave no/little doubt about sth, leave no/little doubt (that), cast/throw doubt on sth, raise doubt about sth, call/throw sth into doubt, express/voice doubts Adjectives: serious/grave doubts, considerable doubts Phrases: there is no/little doubt, without a shadow of a doubt, an element of doubt, slightest doubt No doubt specialised dictionaries of collocations represent an even better resource for developing this important skill and using collocation with confidence. Besides The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations (1997) mentioned above, the recently published Macmillan Collocations Dictionary for Learners of English (2010) provides a complete record of the most typical ways in which common English words combine with one another. [...]some are closely connected with certain nouns, and conversely certain nouns are characteristically selected by certain partitives. Other rather unusual examples include a pride of lions, a bask/float of crocodiles, a hide/ambush of tigers, a shoal offish or sardines (and other specific small fish), a school or pod of dolphins or whales, a tribe of monkeys or baboons. [...]the meaning of the partitives may be determined by the characteristic features and behaviour of the animals.

Headnote

Abstract. It is widely acknowledged that collocations - a natural combination of words - are among the distinguishing marks of a native-like command of English and pose special problems for both foreign learners of English and linguists. My paper discusses the importance of collocations, their various types and their structural and semantic properties.

Keywords: collocations, ELT, lexicography, lexicology, semantics, partitives

1. Introduction

It is widely acknowledged that collocations - a natural combination of words - (e.g. strongly recommend, drop a hint, a thirst for adventure, fully aware, heated discussion, etc.) are among the distinguishing marks of a native-like command of English and pose special problems for both foreign learners and teachers of English and linguists.

Nevertheless, collocations - regardless of their frequency - were a vastly neglected phenomenon in both ELT and linguistics until the 1990's, when a new approach to language learning and teaching, namely the Lexical Approach appeared, whose the key element is collocation. Several influential books were published in this field, among others Michael Lewis' Implementing the Lexical Approach (1997) and Teaching Collocations: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach (2000), which gave a central role to vocabulary acquisition and more specifically to collocation. As assumed by Lewis (1997, 2000), the language learner comprehends and produces language on the basis of lexical phrases (chunks), one of which are collocations. In other words, collocational patterns form the core of word knowledge and increasing the learners' collocational competence is the way to improve their language as a whole. Thus, learning collocations not only increases the mental lexicon but develops fluency as well.

Similarly, in linguistics, despite the increasing recognition that is being given to collocations, there are very few systematic accounts of them, one of which was developed in the lexicographic context. Lexicographically oriented researchers such as Benson, Benson and Ilson (1986, 1997) and Sinclair (1987) noted that collocations are lexical items standing in a specific syntagmatic and semantic relations with one another and that they are classifiable and listable accordingly. The first dedicated lexicographical account of collocation led to the publication of the BBI Dictionary (The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations Revised Edition., by Benson et al. 1997, formerly known as The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English: A Guide to Word Combinations, Benson et al. 1986). Almost at the same time, Hill and Lewis (1997) also brought out their Dictionary of Selected Collocations.

By publishing his book Corpus, Concordance, Collocation (1991), Sinclair also became an early leader in the fields of collocation studies and computational linguistics. He was the founder of the ground-breaking COBUILD project in lexical computing, which revolutionized lexicography in the 1980s and resulted in a new generation of corpus-driven dictionaries, the first of which was Collins Cobuild English Dictionary (1987). Since then, numerous excellent dictionaries have been published, the great advantage of which is their unique computer database, containing several hundred million words, that is continuously expanding. For example, the fifth edition of Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2009), like all Longman dictionaries, was compiled using the Longman Corpus Network, which offers a huge database of 330 million words, taken from a wide range of real life sources.

Remarkably, the newer editions of such general-purpose dictionaries pay more and more attention to collocations as exemplified by Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2009), which was transformed into an integrated collocations dictionary containing over 65,000 common collocations. What is more, if a word has several collocations, they are listed in a box at the end of the entry, as illustrated by the following example (Mayor 2009:506):

Doubt:

Verbs: have doubts, have your doubts, have no/little doubt, leave no/little doubt about sth, leave no/little doubt (that), cast/throw doubt on sth, raise doubt about sth, call/throw sth into doubt, express/voice doubts

Adjectives: serious/grave doubts, considerable doubts

Phrases: there is no/little doubt, without a shadow of a doubt, an element of doubt, slightest doubt

No doubt specialised dictionaries of collocations represent an even better resource for developing this important skill and using collocation with confidence. Besides The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations (1997) mentioned above, the recently published Macmillan Collocations Dictionary for Learners of English (2010) provides a complete record of the most typical ways in which common English words combine with one another. Deriving its information from a 2-billion-word corpus, this excellent dictionary contains collocations with over 4500 carefully-selected key words, grouped in semantic sets.

In the light of what has been pointed out above, it should come as no surprise that collocations still serve as a topic of interest not only for lexicologists and lexicographers, but for learners and teachers of English as well. The present paper will discuss the structural and semantic properties of English partitive constructions, touching upon the importance and classifications of collocations in general.

2. The importance and classifications of collocations

In general terms, collocations are defined as "the habitual co-occurrence of individual lexical items"(Crystal 2003:82), "the readily observable phenomenon whereby certain words co-occur in natural text with greater than random frequency" (Lewis 1997:8), "frequently recurrent, relatively fixed syntagmatic combinations of two or more words" (Bartsch 2004:11) or ''the property of language whereby two or more words seem to appear frequently in each other's company" (Rundell 2010:vii)

The first and most obvious reason why collocations are important is that the way words combine in collocations is fundamental to all language use. In Lewis's view (2000:53), it is possible that up to 70% of everything we say, hear, read or write is to be found in some form of fixed expression.

It is a well-known fact that in order to speak and write English in a natural and accurate way, learners need to be familiar with collocations. As was observed by O'Dell and McCarthy (2008:4), people will probably understand what one means when one talks about *making a crime or say that * there was very hard rain this morning, but one's language will sound unnatural and might perhaps be confusing. Collocations may also provide speakers with alternative ways of saying something, which may be more colourful/expressive or more precise: instead of repeating It was very cold and very dark,, one can say It was bitterly cold and pitch dark. A good way of demonstrating one's wide vocabulary is to employ natural collocations, and being able to produce them is an indication of fluency. Especially in advanced level exams, a good grasp and an appropriate handling of collocation is a real advantage. McCarther (2010: ix), ELT author and teacher, notes that a student who is about to sit for the IELTS (the International English Language Testing System) and who has a reasonably large vocabulary of around 7,500 words, but no awareness of how words work naturally together, will be at a disadvantage compared to someone who may have a smaller vocabulary (5000 words), but is able to use those words effectively and combine them in natural sounding ways.

According to Lewis (2000:53-55), collocations don't only allow us to think more quickly and be more fluent, but they also enable us to communicate more efficiently. One of the main reasons why learners of English find listening, reading or speaking difficult is that they cannot recognise and produce these natural word combinations, which may often express complex ideas. Memory plays an important role in mastering collocations and exposure to them can develop learners' confidence as well.

Bartsch (2004:17) points out that collocations play an important role in the resolution of lexical ambiguity caused by polysemy and the subtle distinctions between seemingly synonymous words which can often only be drawn by considering the immediate linguistic context in which a lexical item occurs.

There have been several attempts made to categorise collocations, for example Benson et al. (1986 ix-xxiii), Hill (2000:51), McCarthy and O'Dell (2005:12) and O'Dell and McCarthy (2008: 10). In general, collocations are categorised by taking into account the elements they contain:

1. Verb + noun {draw up a contract, pass up a chance)

2. Noun + verb {an opportunity arises, standards slip)

3. Adjective + noun (idle threat, vain hope)

4. Adverb + adjective (intensely personal, stunningly attractive)

5. Verb + adverb (drive recklessly, fail miserably)

6. Noun + noun (a barrage of questions, a snippet of information)

7. Verb + prepositional phrase (be filled with horror, foam at the mouth)

8. More complex collocations (take it easy for a while, put the past behind you)

Furthermore, Hill (2000:63-64) and O'Dell and McCarthy (2008:8) propose a different categorization of collocations, depending on how closely their constituents are associated with each other:

1. Unique collocations (to foot the bill, to shrug your shoulders): the verb is not used with any other nouns. Such collocations are called idioms;

2. Strong collocations (rancid butter): the words are very closely associated with each other, e.g. rancid is most commonly used with butter or bacon;

3. Weak collocations (long hair): are made up of words that collocate with a wide range of other words, these combinations are completely free and predictable;

4. Medium strength collocations (to make a mistake, to hold a meeting): These are neither free nor completely fixed.

Both Hill's (2000) and O'Dell and McCarthy's (2008) classification of lexical collocations show that collocation is a matter of degree, ranging from weak collocation, with only the slightest degree of predictability of co-occurrence, through strong collocation, that is almost entirely predictable, to fixed/unique combinations, which are completely fixed. Nevertheless, collocations have specific structural and semantic properties. To explore these, I shall examine the Noun + Noun collocation type, which represents English partitive constructions (e.g. a pinch of salt, a herd of cattle and a stroke of luck, etc.).

3. Partitive constructions and their collocations

Partitives (unit nouns) are commonly used to denote a part of whole or the quantity of an undifferentiated mass. Having specific syntactic, semantic properties, partitives represent a difficult and challenging aspect of English vocabulary for both students and teachers. Besides, collocations also exhibit some semantic constraints on the nouns they co-occur with. In fact, some are closely connected with certain nouns, and conversely certain nouns are characteristically selected by certain partitives. Some of them are very general in meaning, occurring with many quantifiable lexical items (piece, group), others are restricted to a single item or a very small set (e.g. a blade of grass, a knob of butter, a tuft ofhair/grass, a clump of trees/bushes and a flock of birds/sheep, etc.). Next let us examine what kind of syntactic, semantic properties English partitives have, focussing on their collocational constraints. The examples are primarily taken from Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2009).

3.1 Syntactic properties

Certain partitive expressions collocate strongly with particular kinds of nouns - singular, plural, non-count or countable, concrete or abstract nouns:

- Singular, Non-count, Concrete Nouns: a speck of dust, a grain of rice, a dash of vinegar and a drop of oil, etc.

- Singular, Non-count, Abstract Nouns: a stroke of luck, a spell of dry weather and a flicker of interest, etc.

- Plural, Count, Concrete Nouns: a herd of elephants, a swarm of bees, a bunch of keys and a pile of blankets, etc.

- Plural, Count, Abstract Nouns: a gamut of emotions, a torrent of questions, a stream of insults, a barrage of complaints and a series of lectures, etc.

3.2 Semantic properties

As far as their meaning is concerned, partitive constructions commonly refer to the part, the amount, the shape, the arrangement, collection of entitities, the container which holds the item referred to and the period of a time of an action/state/feeling, etc. The major semantic types of partitives are illustreated below:

1. Partitives referring to conventionalized measures:

a kilo of apples, an ounce of tobacco, an ounce of gold, a spoonful of medicine, a foot of wire, a yard of cloth, a litre of milk, a gallon ofpetrol, a pint of beer/milk, etc.

2. Partitives referring to parts of the whole, meaning a piece of (very small, small or large):

a grain of sand/salt, a speck of dust, a slice of meat, a knob of butter, a clove ofgarlic, a splinter of wood/glass, a lump of clay, a hunk of bread, etc.

3. Partitives denoting containers, semantically related to volume:

a barrel of beer, a basket of fruit, a bottle of milk, a carton of orange juice, a packet of cigarettes, a glass of water, a jug of water, a mug of cocoa, a tin of soup, a tube ofpaste, a vase offlowers, a pool of standing water/blood, etc.

4. Partitives expressing quantity, a small/big amount of mass nouns:

a pinch of salt, a sprinkling of cinnamon, a dollop of cream, a morsel of chocolate/bread, a dash of vinegar, a drop of oil, a swig of lemonade, a shock of hair, etc.

5. Partitives expressing a small amount of abstract notions:

a touch of sadness/class/irony/humour, a shred of evidence/truth/selfesteem, a grain of truth/courage/sympathy, a spot of bother/trouble/work/sailing/yachting, a crumb of injormation/hope/'comfort, a ray of hope/comfort, a snippet of news/information/'conversation, etc.

6. Partitives related to the shape of things:

a bar of chocolate/soap, a sheet of paper/steel/ice, a strip of cloth/land, a stick of celery, a column of smoke, a ball of string, a head of lettuce, an ear of corn, a blade of grass, etc.

2097. Partitives indicating collections of entities meaning (a) a group of animals, (b) people, and (c) things:

a) a herd of cattle/deer/elephants, a flock of birds/chickens/sheep/goats, a pack of dogs, wolves/hounds, a shoal of fish/'sardines, a school of dolphins/whales, a tribe of monkeys/baboons, a bask/float of crocodiles, a swarm of bees/locusts, a colony of sea birds/insects/ants, an army of caterpillars/ants, a litter ofpuppies/kittens, a hide/ambush of tigers, etc.

b) a gang of hooligans/thieves/smugglers/kids/youth,a rabble of noisy angry youth, a mob of demonstrators, a swarm of children/tourists, a troop of soldiers, a troupe of actors/singers/dancers, a party of tourists, a team of doctors, a bunch of people, a cluster of people, a horde of tourists, a mass of people, a crowd of people, etc.

c) clump of trees/bushes/plants, a bunch of flowers/keys/grapes/bananas, a bundle of papers/clothes/sticks, a cluster of star/shops/motels, a fleet of ships, a tuft of hair/grass, etc.

8. Partitives denoting a whole range of activities/emotions or a large amount/number of abstract notions:

a flurry ofphone calls, a gamut of emotions/new experiences, a torrent of abuse/criticism/Greek/Italian/questions, a stream of traffic/abuse/visitors/jokes/ insults/'questions, a barrage of questions/complaints/criticism, a spate of attacks/thefts/burglaries, etc.

9. Partitives referring to arrangement of entities:

a pile of bricks/wood/blankets/bills/boxes/clothes, a stack of papers, a heap of dead leaves/bones/ashes/clothes, a line/a row/a queue of people, a column of soldiers/military vehicles/marching men/ants, a cluster of stars/shops/motels, etc.

10. Partitives referring to a period of time of an action/state/feeling:

a fit of laughter/cough /anger/panic, a round of applause, a flurry of activity/speculation/snow, a bout of flu/nausea/depression, a spell of dry /cold weather,a flicker of hope/interest/regret/amusement/uncertainty/excitement, a glimmer of hope/interest, a stroke of genius/inspiration, a stroke of luck/fortune, etc.

Examining the above semantic classes of partitives, one can notice that some partitives expressed by nouns that, when used in isolation, have concrete objects as referents, have a literal meaning, e.g. a stick of celery, a blade of grass, a ball of string, a cube of ice and a slice of bread, etc., just like those denoting containers, e.g. a barrel of beer, a basket of fruit, a bottle of milk, a packet of cigarettes, a glass of water or a jug of water, etc.

Similarly, the partitives of arrangement have an element of shape in their meaning: a line of, a row of, a pile of, a heap, a stack of and a bundle of entities. A line/a row of refer to things or people next to each other, while a cluster refers to a group of entities of the same kind that are close together. In the case of a pile of and a heap, there is a difference in meaning depending on how the things are arranged. The former refers to things arranged with one on top of the other and the latter to their being arranged in an untidy way. Similarly, a bundle refers to several papers, clothes or sticks held or tied together in an untidy way.

When they collocate with nouns that belong to the same semantic family, partitives denoting an amount of something have a similar literal meaning, but there is a difference in the amount or size of the quantified entity: A hunk of bread/cheese or meat refers to a thick or large slice, a knob of butter refers to a small lump of butter, a dollop of cream is a large spoonful of cream, thus bigger than a dash of cream, which is a small amount. A swig of Cola refers to a large mouthful from a bottle, while a drop of brandy in your tea refers to a smaller amount. Similarly, in the case of partitives denoting a piece/whole relationship, a blade of grass is a single thin leaf and a tuft of grass means a bunch of grass. A clove of garlic means one small separate section of a head of garlic or a slice of bread is a slice cut from a loaf of bread.

Sometimes the partitives, especially those referring to a group of entities, reveal some property of the entities. The use of partitives that collocate with animals depends on the animals referred to. So, we talk about a pack of dogs, hounds and wolves, but a herd of cattle and elephants (and other large herbivorous mammals). We say a swarm of bees/locusts (and other flying insects), but a flock of birds and also a flock of sheep. Other rather unusual examples include a pride of lions, a bask/float of crocodiles, a hide/ambush of tigers, a shoal offish or sardines (and other specific small fish), a school or pod of dolphins or whales, a tribe of monkeys or baboons. Thus, the meaning of the partitives may be determined by the characteristic features and behaviour of the animals.

The partitives used to denote a group of people may also reflect the behaviour of those people. A gang may refer to (especially young) people who go around together and often deliberately cause trouble and fight with other groups or criminals. A rabble refers to a noisy group of people who behave badly, a horde is a large crowd moving in an uncontrolled way and a mob refers to a large, noisy and perhaps violent crowd. A team of people are a group of people who work together and a party of tourists are a group of people who are travelling together.

Remarkably, some partitives derived from verbs are related to the result of actions, such as a pinch of salt, a dash of vinegar, a sip of water, a slice of bread, a sprinkle of sugar, a sniff of fresh air, a drop of brandy, a sprinkling of herbs/spices, a glimmer of light, a flicker of hope, a wink of sleep and a spurt of flame/energy/anger, etc.

The partitives may have metaphorical and associative meanings that depend on the nouns they quantify. Bunch in a bunch of keys/ flowers/ bananas/grapes (fastened, held or growing together) and cluster in a cluster of star/shops/motels (close together in the same place) are semantically related to bunch and cluster in a bunch of people, used in informal style, and a cluster of people, a group of people, all in the same place, respectively. Similarly, the meaning of a swarm of tourists/children is understood by analogy with a swarm of bees/insects. Herd and flock, which refer to a group of animals {a herd of cattle/elephants or a flock of sheep/birds) can also be used for a group of people: a herd of people denotes a group of people acting together without planned direction, while a flock of people suggests a large number of people going together somewhere because something interesting is happening there. A torrent of abuse/criticism or a stream of abuse/visitors/questions are associated with a torrent/ a stream of water, respectively. We can state therefore that the extended meanings of these partitives are derived from their prototypical meanings.

One can witness a metaphorical extension of the literal meaning of partitives in other cases as well. A small amount/piece of something can metaphorically be interpreted as a small amount of quality. A dash can refer to a small amount of substance that is added to something else (e.g. Add salt, pepper and a dash of vinegar) or a small amount of a quality that is added to something else (e.g. Add a dash of romance to your life with a trip to Paris). A pinch of salt refers to a small amount of salt, however to take something with a pinch of salt means that you do not believe that something is completely accurate or true. Similarly, a grain can denote a very small quantity of substance such as sand or salt, but it can refer to a very small amount of quality in the case of truth/courage/sympathy. A crumb refers to a very small piece of dry food, especially bread and cake, but it can refer to a small amount of abstract notion, e.g. a crumb of hope/comfort/affection.

Some partitives are restricted to a small set or to a single item, e.g a shoal offish or sardines, a clump of trees or bushes, a dollop of cream, a clove of garlic and a pride of lions, etc. Furthermore, most English partitives exhibit some semantic constraints on the nouns which they co-occur with. Collective partitives usually occur together with nouns denoting animals, people and objects, whereas those denoting amounts or parts of the whole typically collocate with nouns denoting food, drinks or some other materials. As pointed out, most partitives and the nouns they combine with form literal combinations; however, the literal meanings of some partitives can be metaphorically extended to the abstract domain as well. Finally, there is often a specific relation between the partitive and some property of the quantified noun.

4. Conclusion

Although it is widely acknowledged that collocations - a common and natural phenomenon in language - tend to be both indispensable and problematic for language learners and that they should play an important part in second language teaching, especially at an advanced level, the relevant aspects of collocations have not been investigated in as much detail in either linguistics or ELT as those of idioms and other multi-word expressions. Nevertheless, with the advent of corpus linguistics, collocations received due consideration in lexicology, and it became possible for lexicographers to reveal invaluable information about the collocational behaviour of words (cf. Sinclair 1987), resulting in the publication of such excellent dictionaries as Macmillan Collocations Dictionary (2010). The interest in collocations was also stirred by the appearance of the Lexical Approach in ELT, represented by Lewis (1997, 2000).

As was argued above, in addition to the fact that by employing natural collocations speakers demonstrate a wide range of vocabulary and fluency, their use also enables learners to express complex ideas, make their oral and written performance more colourful and accurate. In other words, collocations help them to develop the ability of sounding more natural when using English. The constituents of collocations are not just in direct syntactic relation with each other, but they can also be lexically constrained.

By paying special attention to English partitive constructions, this paper has attempted to reveal what special syntactic and semantic properties collocations may have and to highlight their importance for teaching and learning English as a foreign language.

References

References

Bartsch, S. 2004. Structural and Functional Properties of Collocations in English. A corpus study of lexical and pragmatic constraints on lexical co-occurrence. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.

Benson, M., E. Benson, and R. Ilson. 1986. The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English. A Guide to Word Combinations. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

Benson, M., E. Benson, and R. Ilson. 1997. The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company.

Crystal, D. 2003. A Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics. Fifth Edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Hill, J. 2000. "Revising priorities: From Grammatical failure to collocational success" in Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. Michael Lewis, (ed.). Hove: Language Teaching Publications, pp. 47-69.

Hill, J. and M. Lewis. 1997. Dictionary of Selected Collocations. Hove: Language Teaching Publications.

Lewis, M. 1997. Implementing the Lexical Approach: Putting Theory into Practice. Hove: Language Teaching Publications.

Lewis, M. 2000. "Learning in the lexical approach" in Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. Michael Lewis (ed.). Hove: Language Teaching Publications, pp. 155-158.

Mayor, M. (ed.). 2009. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Harlow: Pearson Educated Limited.

McCarther, S. 2010. "Using the Dictionary in IELTS" in Macmillan Collocations Dictionary for Learners of English. Oxford: Macmillan Publishers Limited, p. ix.

McCarthy, M. and F. O'Dell. 2005. English Collocations in Use. Intermediate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

O'Dell, F. and M. McCarthy. 2008. English Collocations in Use. Advanced. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rundeil, M. 2010. Macmillan Collocations Dictionary for Learners of English. Oxford: Macmillan Publishers Limited.

Sinclair, J.M. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sinclair, J.M. (ed.). 1987. Collins COBUILD English Dictionary. London: Harper Collins Publishers.