Phraseology and Collocations or 'the company that words keep'
Typical examples of collocations or phraseology are:
blond goes with hair (not yellow)
flock goes with sheep (not herd)
Some are quite fixed, eg spick and span, cup and saucer
Others are created in different learning areas and become part of that vocabulary, being used again and again in these combinations:
Information technology (computing)
Muscular contraction (health sciences)
Root penetration (biology)
Nitrogen deficiency (biology)
Others are used across a range of learning areas:
Technical information
Increasing demands
Foregoing discussion
Recent research
Collocation can be difficult for ESL learners because:
- collocations (what goes with what) will vary across languages:
Eg: In English we face problems
in Hebrew one stands in front of problems
In English we interpret dreams
in Hebrew one solves dreams
- the meaning does not always equal the sum total of words (eg, idioms)
'cap in hand', 'out of hand', 'butter fingers', 'to have second thoughts', 'out of the blue', 'once in a blue moon', 'the third degree', 'a catch 22 situation', 'a one-armed bandit', 'sour grapes', 'a black sheep', 'red-tape'
- the meaning might require specific cultural knowledge
Walter Mitty, Doubting Thomas, Jekyll and Hyde, Big Brother, Robin Hood, Four-letter word
Many collocations are predictable for native speakers:
aches and ________
labour of __________
tie the ____________
These expressions can even be syntactically frozen:
Whose eye is she the apple of?
The bush was thoroughly beaten about by her.
Dolores is the party's life and soul.
Some learners of English tend to over-generalise by using more core vocabulary items than native speakers would, e.g.,
He gave her a compliment
He paid her a compliment
Other egs:
She agreed to ____________ a kidney to save somebody's life. (give/donate)
The drunk _____________ over to the bus-stop. (walked/staggered/stumbled/lurched)
The butler _____________ that he'd killed his employer (said/confessed/admitted)
References:
[Spadaro, K (1998) A Sensitive period for lexical acquisition?
In TESOL in context 8 (1) 17-21]
[Levenston , E.(1979) Second Language acquisition: issues and problems.
In Interlanguage Studies Bulletin 4 (2) 147-160]
