CHAPTER 1 the STUDY of COLLOCATIONS 1.0 Introduction 'Collocations' Are Usually Described As "Sequences of Lexical Items W
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CHAPTER 1 THE STUDY OF COLLOCATIONS 1.0 Introduction 'Collocations' are usually described as "sequences of lexical items which habitually co-occur [i.e. occur together]" (Cruse 1986:40). Examples of English collocations are: ‘thick eyebrows’, 'sour milk', 'to collect stamps', 'to commit suicide', 'to reject a proposal'. The term collocation was first introduced by Firth, who considered that meaning by collocation is lexical meaning "at the syntagmatic level" (Firth 1957:196). The syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of lexical items can be schematically represented by two axes: a horizontal and a vertical one. The paradigmatic axis is the vertical axis and comprises sets of words that belong to the same class and can be substituted for one another in a specific grammatical and lexical context. The horizontal axis of language is the syntagmatic axis and refers to a word's ability to combine with other words. Thus, in the sentence 'John ate the apple' the word 'apple' stands in paradigmatic relation with 'orange', 'sandwich', 'steak', 'chocolate', 'cake', etc., and in syntagmatic relation with the word 'ate' and 'John'. Collocations represent lexical relations along the syntagmatic axis. 114 Firth's attempt to describe the meaning of a word on the collocational level was innovative in that it looked at the meaning relations between lexical items, not from the old perspective of paradigmatic relations (e.g. synonyms, antonyms) but from the level of syntagmatic relations. Syntagmatic relations between sentence constituents had been widely used by structural linguists (e.g. 'John ate the apple' is an 'Subject-Verb-Object' construction), but not in the study of lexical meaning. Up till now, studies on collocation have been insufficient in defining the concept of collocation in a more rigorous way (Cowan 1989:1). Since the term 'collocation' was introduced by Firth to describe meaning at the syntagmatic level, subsequent linguists and researchers have not often attempted to define 'collocation' in a more thorough and methodical way. Collocation is still defined as the tendency of a lexical item to co-occur with one or more other words (Halliday, McIntosh & Strevens 1964:33; Ridout & Waldo-Clarke 1970; Backlund 1973, 1976; Seaton 1982; Crystal 1985:55; Cruse 1986:40; Zhang 1993:1). Although the theoretical treatment of collocations has been inadequate, the teaching of collocations to second language (L2) learners has gained importance during the last decade. For a long time the emphasis in vocabulary learning has been on accumulating and memorising lists of word definitions, followed by gap filling exercises (Robinson 1989:276; Gitsaki 1992; for a review of the development of vocabulary teaching see Carter and McCarthy 1988). However, applied linguists realised that vocabulary skills involve more than 115 the ability to define a word. Suggestions were made for a new approach to vocabulary teaching that would avoid the previous emphasis on words in isolation and on word definitions. The new approach would include an examination of the syntagmatic relations of collocation between lexical items, a skill that is evident in the adult native speakers of a language (McCarthy 1984:14-16; Carter 1987:38; Sinclair 1991). The shift of interest towards lexical learning is also evident in the introduction of a new approach to L2 teaching. The Lexical Approach, as it is outlined by Lewis (1993), regards language as grammaticalised lexis and places the way words combine at the centre of its theoretical perspective (Hewitson & Steele 1993). Lexis becomes the central organising principle of the syllabus, and collocation assumes an important syllabus-generating role (Lewis 1993). Raising the learners' understanding of the collocations of words is a matter of first-rate importance (McCarthy 1984:21), since the task of learning collocations can present both intralingual and interlingual problems. 'Collocation' as a term describing lexical relations is not well-defined, and unfortunately joining words that are in principle semantically compatible does not always produce acceptable collocations, e.g. 'many thanks' is an acceptable collocation in English but *'several thanks' is not, in the same way that 'strong tea' is well-formed but *'powerful tea' is not. Further on, unlike paradigmatic relations between words which can be the same for different languages, syntagmatic relations are more likely to differ from language to language (Mitchell 1975:10). For example, English people 116 'draw conclusions' while the Greeks ‘bga;zoun sumpera;smata’ [take out conclusions]; in English you have to 'wait for somebody' while in Greek ‘perime;neiß ka;poion’ [wait somebody]; in English you 'go on a diet' while in Greek 'ka;neiß di;aita’ [do diet]; in English someone who drinks a lot is a 'heavy drinker' while in Greek he is a 'gero; poth;ri' [strong glass]; in English you 'get in touch with someone', while in Greek you 'e;rcese se epafh; me ka;poion' [come to touch with someone]. The purpose of this thesis is to study syntagmatic lexical relations within a framework that will allow a more thorough treatment of the phenomenon of 'collocation', and to investigate the acquisition process of English collocations by L2 learners as an attempt to describe the possible factors affecting the development of English collocational knowledge. 1.1 The Importance of Collocations in L2 Learning The importance of collocations for the development of L2 vocabulary and communicative competence has been underscored by a number of linguists and language teachers who recommend the teaching and learning of collocations in the L2 classroom. Collocation has been considered as a separate level of vocabulary acquisition. Bolinger (1968) and (1976) argues that we learn and memorise words in chunks and that most of our "manipulative grasp of words is by way of collocations" (Bolinger 1976:8). The learning of language in segments of collocation size, especially in children, is proved by the fact that "the collocate is 117 what the young child produces if you ask him a definition", e.g. a 'hole' is 'a hole in the ground' (Cazden 1972:129, cited in Bolinger 1976:11). Bolinger describes language learning as a continuum starting at the morpheme level with word formation rules, moving to the word level and activating phrase formation rules. The last stage before storage into memory is the level where words enter into collocations. When learning a language people may or may not store a morpheme as such, but they do store phrases. For example, the phrase 'indelible ink' will be stored as a phrase, but few people will analyse the word 'indelible' as having the morpheme 'in-' as a prefix (Bolinger 1968:106). Among the early advocates for the importance of collocations in L2 learning and their inclusion in L2 teaching is Brown (1974), who suggests that an increase of the students' knowledge of collocation will result in an improvement of their oral and listening comprehension and their reading speed. In an effort to make the advanced students achieve a better feel of what is acceptable and what is appropriate, Brown outlines a number of exercises. The combination of lexical items as a source of difficulty in vocabulary acquisition has been noted by researchers like Korosadowicz-Struzynska (1980), who claims that the learner's mastery of these troublesome combinations, rather than her/his knowledge of single words, should be an indication of her/his progress (Korosadowicz-Struzynska 1980:111). Korosadowicz-Struzynska reports that students face intralingual and interlingual problems in the use of collocations, and even advanced students who have considerable fluency of expression in a foreign language make collocational errors. The teaching and 118 learning of collocations for production reasons is regarded as essential by Korosadowicz-Struzynska, who also describes certain steps that should be followed in order to promote the teaching of collocations from the initial stages of foreign language learning. These include selection of the most essential words on the basis of usefulness and frequency of occurrence, selection of the most frequent collocations of these words, presentation of these collocations in the most typical contexts, and contrasting any of the selected collocations with the equivalent native-language collocations that could cause interference problems for the learners. The significant role that conventionalised language forms (idioms, routine formulas and other forms such as collocations) play in the development of foreign language learners' communicative competence is stressed by Yorio (1980). One of the functions of conventionalised forms is that they "make communication more orderly because they are regulatory in nature” (Yorio 1980:438). Realising that random selection on purely subjective grounds from diverse conventionalised language forms is totally inadequate for the purposes of foreign language teaching, Yorio describes a set of criteria for the selection of specific forms to be taught: need, usefulness, productivity, currency, frequency, and ease (Yorio 1980:439). It has been claimed that prefabricated language chunks and routinized formulas play an important role in acquiring and using language (Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992:1; Nattinger 1980). Nattinger and DeCarrico have argued that a common characteristic in acquiring a language is the progression from routine 119 to pattern to creative language use (Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992:116). Therefore, it is suggested that the learning