Collocation

Within the area of corpus linguistics, collocation is defined as a pair of words (the 'node' and the 'collocate') which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance.

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Collocations can be in a syntactic relation (such as verb-object: 'make' and 'decision'), 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 grammatically correct sentence will stand out as 'weird' if collocational preferences are violated. This makes collocation an interesting area for language teaching.

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Corpus Linguists specify a Key Word in Context (KWIC) and identify the words immediately surrounding them. This gives an idea of the way words are used.

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The processing of collocations involves a number of parameters, the most important of which is the significance function, which evaluates whether the co-occurrence is purely by chance or statistically significant. Due to the non-random nature of language, most collocations are classed as significant, and the significance scores are simply used to rank the results. Commonly used significance functions include mutual information, t-score, log-likelihood.

Related Topics:
Mutual information - T-score - Log-likelihood

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Some examples for collocates of 'bank' are: central, river, account, manager, into, merchant, money, deposits, lending, society.

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These examples reflect a number of common expressions, 'central bank', 'bank or building society', and so forth. It is easy to see how the meaning of 'bank' is partly expressed through the choice of collocates.

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Contents below should be merged into an article on the structure and properties of idiomatic expressions

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