Collocation

When collocation (from Latin collocatio " position, arrangement " is a specialized term, however, of Engl collocation. ) Is called in linguistics, the frequent occurrence of neighboring words, whatever their common occurrence may initially be justifiable.

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

Definition

The concept of collocation was introduced by John Rupert Firth (1890-1960) without a clear definition; Instead, he cited a few examples.

" J. R. Firth "

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

Among the reasons for the frequent co-occurrence of word pairs or their content combinability include:

• The close semantic relationship,
• A close relationship of the facts, as well as
• Phraseology and stereotypes.

The phenomenon of collocation is in linguistics under terms such as " Animistic meaning relationship " ( Porzig ), " syntactic semantic field " ( Porzig ) and " lexical solidarities " ( Coseriu ) known.

Due to the unclear definition of collocation is preferable under certain circumstances, the term co-occurrence.

Among other things, a distinction is made between a statistical collocation concept and a "significance - oriented collocation term". After randomly oriented Kollokationsbegiff collocation principle " any gathering occurrence of adjacent words in sentences ." After the significance - based collocation term collocation is available only if a common connection is not predictable. Can be described perfectly with the syntagmatic lexical functions straight collocations according to this understanding.

For lexicography is advised to turn to " Although largely semantically transparent, but nevertheless established word combination [ s ] ."

Word order

Often not only the co-occurrence of two words is to be observed, but in addition both words assume a characteristic position to each other in a sentence. While in the example " day - light " it is not clear that at common occurrence comes first of the two words and what follows is in the collocation of the day and bright light with high probability can be assumed that the adjective bright light is paramount, as it practically found only in the fixed phrase in broad daylight, but not as freely positioned in the sentence adjective.

Electronic identification

Collocations can nowadays be determined very efficiently in the context of linguistic data processing in electronic form, large text corpora. These methods come of text mining are being used.

Google with its "Keyword Tool" or keyword Crossing it uses terms such as " co-occurrence ", " collocation " or " synonym " for advertising purposes not technically correct, but mean by " co-occurrence " or " synonym " means a technical process, the term proposals through text analysis produces. In the evaluation of the " collocation " even flow next to the found nearby also advertising technical values ​​, such as click rates and search volume, a.