The distinction among collocation and other forms of word association depends on various properties of collocation. Palmer (1981) characterized collocations with collocational restrictedness and cohesion. Palmer noted that some restrictedness came from the meaning of lexical units, while some restrictedness came from the range (p.
79). That is, lexeme was used with a whole set of lexical units that shared common semantic features. This explained why “pretty man” was conventionally unacceptable because “pretty” was used to describe females. Other restrictions were collocational in the most rigorous sense, such as “addled” with “brains”. Cruise (1986) indicated that word associations involving arbitrary collocational restrictions were semantically more cohesive than those with generalizable selectional restrictions because the former were more predictable. This notion of predictability was comparable to the Firthian notion of ‘mutual expectancy’. It was predictable that the constituents of
collocations were mutually selective.
Bahn and Eldaw (1993) suggested the primary property of collocation was that its meaning reflected the meaning of the constituent parts. This property was referred as semantic transparency of collocations and was used to determine the classification of free combinations, semi-collocations, collocations, and idioms. For instance, the meaning of a collocation, such as “observe the holiday”, is more semantically transparent than that of an idiom, such as “kick the bucket”. Moreover, collocations are semantically and psychologically salient in contrast with free combinations.
Fernando (1996) characterized collocations as multiword expressions with subjective criteria, such as collocation restriction, syntactic structure and semantic opacity.
The classical model of collocation categorization involved class membership depended on criteria attributes. Sinclair (1966) examined the relationship of collocational constituents based on co-occurrence frequency in large quantities of text and classified collocations into two categories of casual collocation and significant
collocation. Casual collocation was interpreted as lexical combination which had least
predictive power over the node and formed accidentally, while significant collocation had a strong tendency to occur near the node.Lewis (1997) extensively categorized collocations into strong, weak, frequent, and infrequent collocations based on fixedness and restrictedness. This meant shifting the focus of attention from the categories to the phraseological models underlying the categorization. Benson et al. (1997) distinguished between grammatical collocations and lexical collocations. Lexical collocations were multi-word combinations of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs with specific structures such as verb-noun,
adjective-noun, noun-verb, noun-noun, adverb-adjective, adverb-verb. Table 2.2.1
summarized the seven basic types of lexical collocations. In contrast, grammaticalcollocations consisted of a major headword, e.g., noun, adjective/ participle, and verbs, accompanied by a preposition or a grammatical construction, such as to + infinitive or
that-clause. Grammatical collocations were further divided into eight basic types of
collocations (see Table 2.2.2).For the purpose of providing a more complete view on multiword expression, Howarth (1996) proposed a continuum model of multiword expressions with properties from syntactic frozenness or invariability to increasing semantic opacity or particularity. The properties included semantic transparency, degree of restrictedness, compositionality, analyzability. Multiword expressions were then classified by the extent to which they formed increasingly fixed units or chunks. There were four typical categories of collocations along the continuum: (1) free combinations, whose meanings were thoroughly compositional (blow a trumpet); (2) restricted collocations, which were less compositional (blow a fuse); (3) figurative idioms (e.g., blow your
own trumpet); and (4) pure idioms (e.g., blow the gaff). Similar continuum models
had also been adopted by other researchers (Palmer, 1981; Cowie, 1981, 1998;Benson et al. 1986; Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992).
Table 2.2.1 Types of Lexical Collocations by Benson et al. (1997) Type Collocation Pattern Adapted Example
L1 verb - noun / pronoun stand trials
L2 verb - propositional phrase come to an conclusion L3 adj.- noun /
noun - noun
burning ambition aptitude test
L4 noun - verb bombs explode
L5 noun1- of - noun2 a cluster of admirers L6 adv.- adj. /
adv.- participle
sound asleep categorically denied
L7 verb - adv. argue heatedly
Cowie (1998) suggested the notion of “a scale of idiomaticity” to represent the phraseological continuum defined by the properties of semantic transparency, restrictedness, compositionality, analyzability. Accordingly, free collocations were characterized as fully compositional, transparent and literal, whereas at the other end of the continuum, pure idioms like “break the ice” or “shoot the breeze” were viewed as non-compositional, opaque and figurative. In contrast to pure idioms, figurative idioms like “give attitude” and “make a U-turn” were considered as transparent since they could be interpreted by literal meaning. Restricted collocations tended to be
Table 2.2.2 Types of Grammatical Collocations by Benson et al. (1997)
Type Pattern Adapted Example
G1 noun - preposition (except noun - of )
apathy towards
G2 noun - to infinitive (5 high frequent patterns)
It was a must to complete it.
He had the foresight to do it.
He felt an urge to do it.
They made efforts to complete it.
He was a fool to do it.
G3 noun - that - clause
He drew a conclusion that the boy is not guilty.
He took an oath that he’ll tell the truth.
G4 prep. - noun
on demand, by chance
G5 prep. - adj.
He was angry at me.
G6 adj. - to - infinitive
It is necessary to finish it.
G7 adj. - that - clause
She was glad that she’s done with that.
G8 verb patterns
All verb patterns
analyzable like figurative idioms and free collocations, but fell in an intermediate position as being neither fully compositional nor unitary because of figurative or specialized meaning of one element and the literal meaning of the others.
In phraseology, the verb in a verb + nominal object collocation has been characterized as typically having either a grammaticalized or delexical meaning as in
“do the laundry”, a figurative meaning as in “run errands”, or a specialized meaning as in “rest the case”. This has led some researchers to explore a separate category of specialized or institutional lexical collocations (L’Homme and Bertrand, 2000). In this regard, there was still paucity of research to explore such questions as, how could the category be clearly defined? Could it be related to a technical register or a general domain like daily-life linguistic use? It was challenging for the continuum model how to treat institutionalized word combinations in which the constituents had a literal meaning; however, the model basically associated idiomaticity with non-literal meaning.
All categories tended to be fuzzy at the edges and should have equal status.
Geeraerts (1997) posed that the individual category including free and restricted collocation had a special status on the basis of good-example ratings of their centrality or prototypicality. Lakoff (1987) explained that prototype effects resulted from our judgment in terms of cognitive models, not that they represented inherent category structure. The prototype categories could “combine structural stability with flexibility” (Poulsen, 2005) and “new entities and new experiences can be readily associated, perhaps as peripheral members, to a prototype category, without necessarily causing any fundamental restructuring of the category system” (Taylor, 1995). The notions of the continumm model and prototype categories provided the essences to classify collocations, elaborate properties and serve as operational criteria for the present study.