Unit 1 What is a collocation?

A. What are collocations?

A collocation is a combination of two or more words which frequently occur together. If someone says, ‘She’s got yellow hair’, they would probably be understood, but it is not what would ordinarily be said in English. We’d say, ‘She’s got blond hair’. In other words, yellow doesn’t collocate with hair in everyday English. Yellow collocates with, say, flowers or paint.

Collocations are not just a matter of how adjectives combine with nouns. They can refer to any kind of typical word combination, for example verb + noun (e.g. arouse someone’s interest, lead a seminar), adverb + adjective (e.g. fundamentally different), adverb + verb (e.g. flatly contradict), noun + noun (e.g. a lick of paint, a team of experts, words of wisdom). There is much more about different grammatical types of collocation in Unit 3.

Phrasal verbs (e.g. come up with, run up, adhere to) and compound nouns (e.g. economy drive, stock market) are sometimes described as types of collocations. In this book we consider them as individual lexical items and so usually include them here only in combination with something else, e.g. come up with a suggestion, run up a bill, adhere to your principles, go on an economy drive, play the stock market. However, it is not always easy to separate collocations and compounds and, where they are useful for learners as an important part of the vocabulary of a topic, we include some compounds in this book too.

It can be difficult for learners of English to know which words collocate, as natural collocations are not always logical or guessable. There is, for example, no obvious reason why we say making friends rather than getting friends or heavy rain, not strong rain. 

Learners also need to know when specific collocations are appropriate. This is usually referred to by linguists as knowing which register to use. Alight from a bus is a formal collocation used in notices and other official contexts. In everyday situations we would, of course, always talk about getting off a bus. There is more about register and collocation in Unit 6.

B. Why is it important to learn collocations?

An appreciation of collocation will help you to: 

• use the words you know more accurately

In other words, you’ll make (NOT do) fewer mistakes.

• sound more natural when you speak and write

By saying, for example, of great importance, rather than of big or high importance, you won’t just be understood, you will – quite rightly – sound like a fluent user of English.

• vary your speech and, probably more importantly, your writing

Instead of repeating everyday words like very, good or nice, you will be able to exploit a wider range of language. You would gain more marks in an exam, for instance, for writing We had a blissfully happy holiday in a picturesque little village surrounded by spectacular mountains than for We had a very happy holiday in a nice little village surrounded by beautiful mountains, even though both sentences are perfectly correct.

• understand when a skilful writer departs from normal patterns of collocation

A journalist, poet, advertiser or other inventive user of language often creates an effect by not choosing the expected collocation. For example, a travel article about the Italian capital might be entitled No place like Rome, a reference to the popular expression There’s no place like Rome.