Editing Collocation

{{Short description|Frequent occurrence of words next to each other}}
{{About|the corpus linguistics notion||Colocation (disambiguation)}}

In [[corpus linguistics]], a '''collocation''' is a series of words or [[terminology|terms]] that [[co-occurrence|co-occur]] more often than would be expected by chance. In [[phraseology]], a '''collocation''' is a type of [[principle of compositionality|compositional]] [[phraseme]], meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an [[idiom]], where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated.

There are about seven main types of collocations<!-- in english?  -->: adjective&nbsp;+&nbsp;noun, noun&nbsp;+&nbsp;noun (such as [[collective nouns]]), noun&nbsp;+&nbsp;verb, verb&nbsp;+&nbsp;noun, adverb&nbsp;+&nbsp;adjective, verbs&nbsp;+&nbsp;prepositional phrase ([[phrasal verb]]s), and verb&nbsp;+&nbsp;adverb.

[[Collocation extraction]] is a computational technique that finds collocations in a document or corpus, using various [[computational linguistics]] elements resembling [[data mining]].

==Expanded definition==
Collocations are partly or fully fixed expressions that become established through repeated context-dependent use. Such terms as ''crystal clear'', ''middle management'', ''nuclear family'', and ''cosmetic surgery'' are examples of collocated pairs of words.

Collocations can be in a [[syntax|syntactic]] relation (such as [[subject–verb–object|verb–object]]: ''make'' and ''decision''), [[lexicon|lexical]] relation (such as [[antonymy]]), or they can be in no linguistically defined relation.  Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent use of a language: a [[grammar|grammatically]] correct sentence will stand out as awkward if collocational preferences are violated.  This makes collocation a common focus for language teaching.

Corpus linguists specify a [[Keyword (linguistics)|key word]] in context ([[key Word in Context|KWIC]]) and identify the words immediately surrounding them, to illustrate the way words are used in practice.

The processing of collocations involves a number of parameters, the most important of which is the ''measure of association'', which evaluates whether the [[co-occurrence]] is purely by chance or statistically [[Statistical significance|significant]].  Due to the non-random nature of language, most collocations are classed as significant, and the association scores are simply used to rank the results.  Commonly used measures of association include [[mutual information]], [[Student's t-test|t scores]], and [[log-likelihood]].<ref>Dunning, Ted (1993): "[http://aclweb.org/anthology/J/J93/J93-1003.pdf Accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120805163029/http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/J/J93/J93-1003.pdf |date=2012-08-05 }}". [[Computational Linguistics (journal)|Computational Linguistics]] 19, 1 (Mar. 1993), 61–74.</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://tdunning.blogspot.com/2008/03/surprise-and-coincidence.html |title=Surprise and Coincidence |author=Dunning, Ted |date=2008-03-21 |publisher=blogspot.com |access-date=2012-04-09 |archive-date=2012-01-20 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120120140321/http://tdunning.blogspot.com/2008/03/surprise-and-coincidence.html |url-status=live }}</ref>

Rather than select a single definition, Gledhill<ref>Gledhill C. (2000): [https://books.google.com/books?id=U8FlfunUIOEC Collocations in Science Writing] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230629054533/https://books.google.com/books?id=U8FlfunUIOEC |date=2023-06-29 }}, Narr, Tübingen</ref> proposes that collocation involves at least three different perspectives: co-occurrence, a statistical view, which sees collocation as the recurrent appearance in a text of a node and its collocates;<ref>Firth J.R. (1957): Papers in Linguistics 1934–1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press.</ref><ref>Sinclair J. (1996): "The Search for Units of Meaning", in Textus, IX, 75–106.
</ref><ref>Smadja F. A & McKeown, K. R. (1990): "[http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P90/P90-1032.pdf Automatically extracting and representing collocations for language generation] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150906073636/http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P90/P90-1032.pdf |date=2015-09-06 }}", Proceedings of ACL'90, 252–259, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.</ref> construction, which sees collocation either as a correlation between a lexeme and a lexical-grammatical pattern,<ref>Hunston S. & Francis G. (2000): [https://books.google.com/books?id=nqqh46Q0uVMC&q=collocation Pattern Grammar — A Corpus-Driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230629054534/https://books.google.com/books?id=nqqh46Q0uVMC&q=collocation |date=2023-06-29 }}, Amsterdam, John Benjamins</ref> or as a relation between a base and its collocative partners;<ref>Hausmann F. J. (1989): Le dictionnaire de collocations. In Hausmann F.J., Reichmann O., Wiegand H.E., Zgusta L.(eds), Wörterbücher : ein internationales Handbuch zur Lexikographie. Dictionaries. Dictionnaires. Berlin/New-York : De Gruyter. 1010–1019.</ref> and expression, a pragmatic view of collocation as a conventional unit of expression, regardless of form.<ref>
Moon R. (1998): Fixed Expressions and Idioms, a Corpus-Based Approach. Oxford, Oxford University Press.</ref><ref>Frath P. & Gledhill C. (2005): "[http://www.academia.edu/download/28949432/Frath__Pierre___Gledhill__Christopher_2005a._Free-Range_Clusters_or_Frozen_Chunks.pdf Free-Range Clusters or Frozen Chunks? Reference as a Defining Criterion for Linguistic Units]{{dead link|date=July 2022|bot=medic}}{{cbignore|bot=medic}}", in Recherches anglaises et Nord-américaines, vol. 38 :25–43</ref> These different perspectives contrast with the usual way of presenting collocation in phraseological studies. Traditionally speaking, collocation is explained in terms of all three perspectives at once, in a continuum:

:Free combination ↔ bound collocation ↔ frozen idiom

==In dictionaries==

In 1933, [[Harold E. Palmer|Harold Palmer]]'s ''Second Interim Report on English Collocations'' highlighted the importance of collocation as a key to producing natural-sounding language, for anyone learning a [[foreign language]].<ref>Cowie, A.P., English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners, Oxford University Press 1999:54–56</ref> Thus from the 1940s onwards, information about recurrent word combinations became a standard feature of [[Monolingual learner's dictionary|monolingual learner's dictionaries]]. As these dictionaries became "less word-centred and more phrase-centred",<ref>Bejoint, H., The Lexicography of English, Oxford University Press 2010: 318</ref> more attention was paid to collocation. This trend was supported, from the beginning of the 21st century, by the availability of large text [[Corpus linguistics|corpora]] and intelligent [[Text mining|corpus-querying software]], making it possible to provide a more systematic account of collocation in dictionaries. Using these tools, dictionaries such as the ''[[Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners|Macmillan English Dictionary]]'' and the ''[[Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English]]'' included boxes or panels with lists of frequent collocations.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.macmillandictionaries.com/about/med/key-features-of-the-macmillan-english-dictionary-second-edition/#7|title=MED Second Edition – Key features – Macmillan|work=macmillandictionaries.com|access-date=2011-08-24|archive-date=2020-09-28|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200928035907/http://www.macmillandictionaries.com/about/med/key-features-of-the-macmillan-english-dictionary-second-edition/#7|url-status=dead}}</ref>

There are also a number of [[Specialized dictionary|specialized dictionaries]] devoted to describing the frequent collocations in a language.<ref>Herbst, T. and Klotz, M. 'Syntagmatic and Phraseological Dictionaries' in Cowie, A.P. (Ed.) The Oxford History of English Lexicography, 2009: part 2, 234–243</ref> These include (for Spanish) ''Redes: Diccionario combinatorio del español contemporaneo'' (2004),  (for French) ''Le Robert: Dictionnaire des combinaisons de mots'' (2007), and (for English) the ''LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations'' (1997) and the ''Macmillan Collocations Dictionary'' (2010).<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.macmillandictionaries.com/features/how-dictionaries-are-written/macmillan-collocations-dictionary/|title=Macmillan Collocation Dictionary – How it was written - Macmillan|work=macmillandictionaries.com|access-date=2011-08-24|archive-date=2018-12-21|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181221182544/http://www.macmillandictionaries.com/features/how-dictionaries-are-written/macmillan-collocations-dictionary/|url-status=dead}}</ref>

== Statistically significant collocation ==
[[Student's t-test|Student's ''t''-test]] can be used to determine whether the occurrence of a collocation in a corpus is statistically significant.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing|url=https://archive.org/details/foundationsstati00mann_118|url-access=limited|last1=Manning|first1=Chris|last2=Schütze|first2=Hinrich|publisher=MIT Press|year=1999|isbn=0262133601|location=Cambridge, MA|pages=[https://archive.org/details/foundationsstati00mann_118/page/n202 163]–166}}</ref> For a [[bigram]] <math>w_1w_2</math>, let <math>P(w_1) = \frac{\#w_1}{N}</math> be the unconditional probability of occurrence of <math>w_1</math> in a corpus with size <math>N</math>, and let <math>P(w_2) = \frac{\#w_2}{N}</math> be the unconditional probability of occurrence of <math>w_2</math> in the corpus. The t-score for the bigram <math>w_1w_2</math> is calculated as:

: <math>t = \frac{\bar{x} - \mu}{\sqrt{\frac{s^2}{N}}}, </math>

where <math>\bar{x} = \frac{\# w_iw_j}{N}</math> is the sample mean of the occurrence of <math>w_1w_2</math>, <math>\#w_1w_2</math> is the number of occurrences of <math>w_1w_2</math>, <math>\mu = P(w_i)P(w_j)</math> is the probability of <math>w_1w_2</math> under the null-hypothesis that <math>w_1</math> and <math>w_2</math> appear independently in the text, and <math>s^2 = \bar{x}(1-\bar{x}) \approx \bar{x}</math> is the sample variance. With a large <math>N</math>, the ''t''-test is equivalent to a [[z-test|''Z''-test]].

==See also==
{{Portal|Linguistics}}
{{div col|colwidth=22em}}
*[[English collocations]]
*[[Agreement (linguistics)]]
*[[Cliché]]
*[[Collocational restriction]]
*[[Collostructional analysis]]
*[[Compound noun, adjective and verb]]
*[[Government (linguistics)]]
*[[Idiom (language structure)]]
*[[Irreversible binomial]]
*[[Isocolon]]
*[[Lexical item]]
*[[N-gram]]
*[[Phrasal verb]]
*[[Phraseology]]
*[[Phraseme#Collocations|Phraseme]]
*[[Sketch Engine]]
*[[Statistically improbable phrase]]
*[[Word sketch]]
{{div col end}}

==References==
{{Reflist}}

==External links==
{{Wiktionary|collocation}}
*[http://ozdic.com/ Ozdic Collocation Dictionary]
* [https://doi.org/10.1007%2F978-3-540-24630-5_30 A Small System Storing Spanish Collocations] (Igor A. Bolshakov & Sabino Miranda-Jiménez)
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120317004247/http://www.cic.ipn.mx/posgrados/images/sources/cic/tesis/B001123.pdf Morphological characterization of collocations and semantic relationships in Spanish] (Sabino Miranda-Jiménez & Igor A. Bolshakov)
* [https://wordassociations.net/en/words-associated-with/surgery?button=Search Example of collocations for the word "Surgery"] at ''wordassociations.net''

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[[Category:Lexical units]]
[[Category:Language education]]
[[Category:Corpus linguistics]]
[[Category:Semantic relations]]