Collocation

We can also use concordances to help us distinguish between two apparently similar words by looking at the different collocations of each.

Collocation is concerned with the particular affinity that certain words have for each other – the co-occurrence of words, or as John Rupert Firth so famously stated, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps”. (1057, p. 179).

The way that words collocate is particularly important for second language learners, but is not always easy to learn. For example, looking at which adjective goes with which noun, we notice that in English we can say ‘pale skin’, but not ‘pale coffee’; ‘weak coffee’, but not ‘weak soup’;‘thin soup’, but not ‘skinny soup’.

Corpus task: Collocation 1

Let us examine some concordances for the words important and significant from a small corpus of articles about language. What do they tell us about how these two words combine with other words?

Feedback: If we compare these two concordances, we can see that whilst both words can occur before nouns, important also occurs in the phrase important + to + verb. The word significant, on the other hand, occurs in the phrase significant + in + noun

Collocation 2

It can take a long time to look through concordances if a word occurs very frequently. Corpus handling software, such as Wordsmith Tools, allows us to see the collocates of all the lines of our concordance in the form of a table. In this context, collocates simply means words that occur with statistical significance.

Look at the following table. It shows the words which occur frequently three places to the left and three places to the right of the particular word we have found 477 occurrences of in a corpus of 5 million words of spoken English. We can see that the word ‘a’ occurs 81 times one place to the left of (i.e. immediately before) our mystery word, and that ‘and’ occurs 43 times one place to the right (i.e. immediately after). Look at the other collocates. What do you think the mystery word is?