Collocation

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Collocation graph for target from DWDS

As collocation (from Latin collocatio "validation," as a technical term but of English. Collocation ) is called in linguistics the frequent occurrence of adjacent words, whatever their common occurrence may be initially justified.

Examples: book - thick, day - light, Jesus - Christianity, cat - meow

definition

The term collocation was introduced by John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) without a clear definition; instead, he gave a few examples:

"One of the meanings of night is its collocability with dark and of dark, of course, collocation with night."

"One of the meanings of night is the collocability with dark and of course of dark with night."

The reasons for the frequent occurrence of the word pairs together or their content-related combinability include:

The phenomenon of collocation is also known in linguistics under terms such as “essential meaning relationship” ( Porzig ), “syntactic meaning field” (Porzig) and “lexical solidarities” (Coseriu).

Due to the unclear definition of collocation , the term co-occurrence may be preferable.

Among other things, a distinction is made between a statistical concept of collocation and a “significance-oriented concept of collocation”. According to the statistically oriented concept of collocation, collocation is in principle "every coexistence of neighboring words in sentences". According to the significance-oriented concept of collocation, a collocation only occurs if a normal connection cannot be foreseen. Especially collocations according to this understanding can be excellently described with the syntagmatic lexical functions .

For the lexicography it is recommended to focus on "semantically largely transparent, but nonetheless established word combinations".

sentence position

Often, not only can two words appear together , but both words also have a characteristic position in relation to one another in a sentence . While in the example mentioned "day - bright" it is not clear which of the two words comes first when they occur together and which follows, with the collocation of day and bright light it can be assumed with high probability that the adjective bright light comes first, da it occurs practically only in the fixed phrase in broad daylight , but not as an adjective that can be freely positioned in a sentence.

Electronic investigation

Nowadays, collocations can be determined particularly efficiently in the context of linguistic data processing on large, electronically available text corpora . Text mining methods are used here. In the free software - Library NLTK ready methods are included for finding collocations.

Google with its “Keyword Tool” or Keyword Crossing does not use terms like “co-occurrence”, “collocation” or “synonym” in a technically correct manner, but rather means with “co-occurrence” or “synonym” a technical process that generates suggested terms for advertising purposes through text analysis . In addition to the proximity found, the evaluation of the “collocation” also includes technical advertising values ​​such as click prices and search volumes.

literature

  • Hadumod Bußmann (Ed.) With the collaboration of Hartmut Lauffer: Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft. 4th, revised and bibliographically supplemented edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-520-45204-7 .
  • John Lyons: Semantics. Volume I. Beck, Munich 1980. See especially syntagmatic lexical relations p. 272ff. ISBN 3-406-05272-X .
  • John Sinclair: Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. 4th Impression, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1997, ISBN 0-19-437144-1 .
  • Thomas Herbst , Michael Klotz: Lexicography. Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2003 (UTB 8263), pp. 83-88, 138-142 (from a lexicographical perspective).
  • Uwe Quasthoff: Dictionary of collocations in German. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2010, ISBN 311018866X .

Web links

Wiktionary: Collocation  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Keyword "Collocation". In: Duden Volume I. The German spelling. Bibliographisches Institut, Mannheim 2004, ISBN 3-411-04013-0 .
  2. ↑ JR Firth: Modes of meaning. In: JR Firth: Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951. London 1951, pp. 190-215, ISBN 0-7581-7058-0 ; on Firth's concept of collocation, cf. David Crystal: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language . Translation and editing of the German edition by Stefan Röhrich, Ariane Böckler and Manfred Jansen. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 1993, ISBN 3-593-34824-1 , p. 105.
  3. ↑ Walter Porzig: Essentially meaningful relationships. In: Contributions to the history of German language and literature 58, 1934, pp. 70–97.
  4. ↑ Walter Porzig: The miracle of language. Problems, methods and results of modern linguistics. Third edition. Francke, Bern 1950. p. 125.
  5. ^ Eugenio Coseriu: Lexical Solidarities. In: Horst Geckeler (ed.): Structural meaning theory. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1978, pp. 239-253.
  6. ↑ a b c d Thomas Herbst, Michael Klotz: Lexicography. Schöningh, Paderborn. 2003 (UTB 8263), p. 83
  7. ^ Collocations. In: NLTK howto. Accessed April 10, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Nicha Ruchirawat: Collocations - identifying phrases that act like single words in Natural Language Processing. In: Medium. March 16, 2018, accessed April 10, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Keyword Tool
  10. ↑ Keyword Crossing