Abstract
John Sinclair1 defines collocation as
the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of one another. The usual measure of proximity is a maximum of four words intervening. Collocations can be dramatic and interesting because unexpected, or they can be important in the lexical structure of the language because of being frequently repeated… Each citation or concordance line exemplifies a particular word or phrase. This word or phrase is called the node. It is normally presented with other words to the left and the right and these are called collocates. The collocates can be counted and this measurement is called the span… attention is concentrated on lexical cooccurrence. independently of grammatical pattern or positional relationship. (Sinclair, 1991: 170; emphasis added)
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© 2007 Bill Louw
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Louw, B. (2007). Literary Worlds as Collocation. In: Watson, G., Zyngier, S. (eds) Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230624856_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230624856_8
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