Collocation
Within the area of corpus linguistics, a collocation can be defined as a sequence of two or more consecutive words that has characteristics of a syntactic and semantic unit, and whose meaning cannot be derived compositionally, i.e. it cannot be derived directly from the meaning of its components.
Common features of collocations are:
- Non-compositionality: The meaning of a collocation is not a straightforward composisition of the meaning of its parts. For example, the meaning of kick the bucket has nothing to do with kicking buckets.
- Non-substitutability: We cannot substitute a word in a collocation with a related word. For example, we cannot say yellow wine instead of white wine although both yellow and white are the names of colors.
- Non-modifiability: We cannot modify a collocation or apply syntactic transformations. For example, John kicked the green bucket or the bucket was kicked has nothing to do with dying.
