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On Collocations

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Book cover Syntax-Based Collocation Extraction

Part of the book series: Text, Speech and Language Technology ((TLTB,volume 44))

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Abstract

The primary goal of this chapter is to set the stage for the practical investigations described in the remainder of this book by providing an overall picture of the existing theoretical descriptions of collocation phenomenon. Because the various approaches to collocation—motivated by linguistic, lexicographic, pedagogical or computational considerations—often made use of vague and inconsistent terminology, we begin by providing an analytic review of the definitions of collocation available in the literature and then identify the most salient and uncontroversial features of the phenomena that will serve as the basis for the discussion throughout the rest of the book. After reviewing the definitions, we present a brief discussion of the main theoretical linguistic frameworks which have addressed collocation phenomena. We then consider characterizations proposed by various researchers in terms of semantic compositionality and morpho-syntactic behaviour. We conclude with giving the definition of collocation which we believe most adequately captures this phenomena for our present purposes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bally distinguishes between “groupements passagers” (free combinations), “groupements usuels” (collocations), and “séries phraséologiques” (idioms).

  2. 2.

    For instance, Wanner et al. (2006, 611) notes that the second notion “is different from the notion of collocation in the sense of Firth (1957) (…) who define a collocation as a high probability association of lexical items in the corpus”.

  3. 3.

    A statistical approach, called distributional, and a phraseological (linguistic) approach, called intensional (Evert, 2004b).

  4. 4.

    See also Manning and Schütze’s (1999) non-substitutability criterion mentioned in Section 2.5.

  5. 5.

    Literally, “general validity have”.

  6. 6.

    An analogy can be found between the idiom principle and the Elsewhere Principle in linguistics, concerned with the opposition between regularity and specificity. This principle states that whenever two rules can be applied, the more specific one overwrites the more general one. An account for idioms based on this principle was proposed by Zeevat (1995).

  7. 7.

    A linguistic operation is said to be performed in a regular way if it conforms to the lexicon and to the general rules of the grammar (general rules refer to rules involving classes of lexemes, as opposed to individual lexemes). It is performed in a non-restricted way if it can use any item of the lexicon and any grammar rule, without mentioning other lexical items (Mel’čuk, 2003).

  8. 8.

    For example, Dico and LAF (Polguère, 2000), Papillon (Boitet et al.,2002; Sérasset, 2004); (Mangeot, 2006), DAFLES (Selva et al., 2002).

  9. 9.

    Firth (1968, 183) describes the concept of colligation as “the interrelation of grammatical categories in syntactical structure”.

  10. 10.

    Sinclair’s position on the syntax-lexicon continuum and the place of collocations is even more radical: “The decoupling of lexis and syntax leads to the creation of a rubbish dump that is called ‘idiom’, ‘phraseology’, ‘collocation’, and the like. (…) The evidence now becoming available casts grave doubts on the wisdom of postulating separate domains of lexis and syntax” (Sinclair, 1991, 104).

  11. 11.

    Nevertheless, some studies have attempted to grade the compositionality of phraseological units, e.g., McCarthy et al. (2003), Baldwin et al. (2003), Venkatapathy and Joshi (2005), and Piao et al. (2006). A larger number of works focused, more generally, on distinguishing between compositional and non-compositional units: see, among many others, Bannard (2005), Fazly and Stevenson (2007), McCarthy et al. (2007), Cook et al. (2008), Diab and Bhutada (2009).

  12. 12.

    Only the criterion of non-substitutability (17c) is commonly associated with collocations.

  13. 13.

    The following abbreviations are used for part-of-speech categories: A – adjective, Adv – adverb, Conj – conjunction, D – determiner, Inter – interjection, N – noun, P – preposition, V – verb.

  14. 14.

    These combinations correspond to the so-called lexical collocations according to Benson et al.’s description of collocations (1986a). Benson et al. divide the collocations in two broad classes, one allowing exclusively open-class words (lexical collocations) and one involving function words as well (grammatical collocations).

  15. 15.

    On the same line, Kjellmer (1990, 172) notes that functional categories such as articles and prepositions are collocational in nature.

  16. 16.

    Usually, a frequency threshold is applied in related work to ensure the reliability of statistical association measures, as will be seen in Chapter 3. Instead, we consider that the initial selection of collocation candidates must be exhaustive, independent of the statistical computation, and that specific restrictions may be applied later depending on the subsequent processing.

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  1. Department of Linguistics (Office L706), University of Geneva, Rue de Candolle 2, 1211, Geneva, Switzerland

    Violeta Seretan

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Seretan, V. (2011). On Collocations. In: Syntax-Based Collocation Extraction. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0134-2_2

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