Collocation

Oleh Mardiana (20401107117)
Meaning of term collocation is included in the field of meaning. Collocation included in the meaning of example, the plate is a place to eat, cooking pots, grated tools, all collocation included in the kitchen. Words such as boats, sailing, rowing, stern, bow, wave, ocean, sea contained in collocatin.Collocation generally defined as the prevalence of only the word pairs with words mouth said the kick would with the foot. Collocation may also refer to the relationship of meaning with each other that can be exchanged. This concept is in line with the concept of paradigmatic relations. Word meaning bite collocation relation with.

a. Dog

b. Mesquitos.

Chair collocation with sit [sit on the chair].

Field theory as proposed by Trier is essentially concerned with paradigmatic relations. About the same time Porzig [1934] argued for the recognition of the importance of systematic relations, between e.g.bite and teeth, bark and dog, blond and hair. In a slightly different way Firth [1951]. Argued that,’’ you shall know a word by the company it keeps’’. His familiar example was that of as which occurred [in a now defunct variety of English]. In you silly-, Don’t be such an-, and with a limited set of adjectives such as silly, obstinate, stupid, awful and occasionally] egregious. For Firth this keeping company, which he called collocation, was part of the meaning of a word. As we have seen, meaning was also to be found in the context of situation and all the other levels of the as well.

It is, of course, obvious that by looking at the linguistic context of words we can often distinguish between different meanings. Nida [1964;98]. For instance, discussed the used of chair in;

a. The chairman of the meeting

b. The electric chair.

There are clearly in pairs, giving four different meanings of the word. But this does not so much establish, as illustrate, differences of meaning. Dictionaries, especially the larger ones, quite rightly make considerable use of this kind of contextualization.

Collocation is not simply a matter of ideas. For, although milk is white, we should not often say white milk, though the expression white paint is common enough. Some of Porzig’s examples seem more concerned with association of ideas. More importantly, perhaps, although collocation is very larger determined by meaning, it is sometime fairly idiosyncratic and cannot easy be predicated in terms of the meaning of the associated words. One is Porzig’s blond with hair. For we should not talk about ‘ a blond door or ` a blond dress, even if the colors were exactly that of blond hair. Similarly rancid occurs only with bacon and butter, and addled with brains and eggs, in spite of the fact that English has the terms rotten and bad and that milk never collocates with rancid but only with sour. We shall see [6.5] that pretty child and buxom neighbor would normally rever to females; here it is relevant to point out that we should not normally say pretty boy or buxom man, though pretty girl and buxom woman are quite normal. This characteristic of language is found in extreme from in the collocative words flock of sheep, herd of cows, school of wholes, pride of lions, and the rather more absurd examples such as chattering of magpies, exaltation of larks. Here we should also included dog /bark, cat /mew, sheep /bleat, horse /neigh, etc.

It is also the case that words my have more specific meaning in particular collocations. Thus we can speak of abnormal to expectional weather if we have a heat wave in November, but an expectional child is not an abnormal child, expectional being used for greater than usual ability and abnormal to relate to some kind of defect [ though, addly, for ‘ euphemistic ‘ expectional is now being used byosme people, [ especially in America, in place of abnormal].

It would, however , be a mistake to attempt to draw a clear distinguishing line between those collocations that are predictable from the meanings of the words that co-occur and those that are not [ though same linguistic have wished to restrict the term collocation to the latter ]. For one can, with varying degrees of plausibility , profide a semantic explanation for even the more restricted collocation to the individual words. Thus it could be argued that rancid is to be defined in term of the very specific, unpleasant, taste associated with butter and bacon that is off’. That pretty describes only a feminine kind of beauty. We can also redefine our terms. We can thus explain white coffee, white wine and white people by suggesting that white means something like, with the lightest of the normal colours associated with the entity’. There is some plausibility in accounting for dogs bark, cats new in terms of the kind if noise made, since bark can also be used of other animals, e.g. Squirrels, this should not, however , lead us to concluded that all of these restricted collocations can be accounted for semantically. For examples where it would seem totally inappropriate. It is difficult to see any semantic hard and flock is that one is used with cows and the other with sheep.

In any case, it is often difficult , even in principle, to decide whether a collocation is or not semantically determined , because the meaning of one of the collocated terms seems to depend upon the collocation. Thus Porzig’s [ 1934 ] noted that the German verb reiten ‘to rede’ was origionally restricted to riding a horse, but can now be used to denote sitting astride a beam. By contrast, the English verb ride is now used for riding a bicycle, but not sitting astride a beam [ Lyons 1977;263 ]. Example a widening of both the meaning and of the collocation , but would be difficult to decided which of these two is the more basic. It might seem reasonable, at first, to say that the widening of the meaning has permitted the new collocation, but it is not obvious how the widened meanings can be stated expect in terms of the new collocations – ‘ riding’ the beam, riding a bicycle.

Another difficulty that arises from any attempt to separate collocation and semantics is the fact that a word will often collocate with a number of other words that have something in common semantically. More strikingly [for negative example often make the point more clearly], we find that individual words or sequences of words will not collocated with certain groups of words. Thus, though we may say. The rhododendron died, we shall not say The rhododendron passed away, in spite of the fact that pass away seems to mean ‘ die’ But equally, of course, we should not use pass away with the names of any shrubs, not even with a shrub whose name we had heard for the first time. Is not very plausible to say that pass away indicates a specially kind of dying that is not characteristic of shrub. It is rather that there is a restriction on its use with a group of words that are semantically related. The restrictions are, it has been suggested [ Mcintosh 1961 ], a matter of RANGE; we know roughly the kind of nouns [ in terms of their meaning ] with which a verb or adjective simply because we have never heard them before – we rely on our knowledge of the