词汇的搭配意义

Collocative Meaning of Words

Language is a combination of form and meaning of words. The form plays a role as media

of spelling, pronunciation and communication while the meaning is the content of the form. A linguist, Firth, was the first person who proposed the conception of “collocative meaning”. Geoffrey N. Leech had proposed seven rules of semantics which include conceptual meaning, connotative meaning, social meaning, affective meaning, reflective meaning, collocative meaninga and thematic meaning. And the brief introduction of collocative meaning as follow: The collocative meaning of words is on the basis of the association of combining words which refer to different meanings. The meaning of words needs to be connected with the combination of phrases, which means that part of the phrase’s meaning is designed by the connecting words.

Most synonyms have same meanings with different potential combinations. Take an instance, the meaning of “pretty” is the same with “handsome” but it has personal collocations. Like “pretty” could be arranged with words as “girl”, “lady”, “woman”, “flower”, “garden”, “colour” or “village” while “handsome” should be collocated with words as “boy”, “man”, “car”, “vessel”, “overcoat”, ”palace” or “airliner”.

Words have its collocative rules. There are four limitations in the connection between phrases. Firstly, the meaning of words is totally decided by the way and the logic of collocation. For instance, we have a sentence as “he was justly proud”, but we would not use a sentence as “he was justly arrogant”. Secondly, the meaning of words is decided by the scale of collocation, which means a phrase can match with a group of words which have common meaning and could be used in other forms. As an example, there is a sentence as “the baby tiger died”, and the phrase “died”here cannot be replaced by the phrases “passed away”. Thirdly, set phrase, which means the meaning of words isn’t designed by the logic or the scale of the collocation, is accepted as a fixed expression by people. For example, “rancid”, “bacon” and “butter” have equivalent combination, “addled”, “brain” and “eggs” could be used in similar expression. Last, the match of words is unreasonable, which with illogical collocative meaning, but accepted as a usual practice. For example, “to cry one’s eyes out” means deep cry, “to have one’s heart in one’s month” means very surprise.

Collocation of words is a language phenomenon. Language is deeply occurred by the ethnic culture; therefore different nations have diverse methods in recognizing and describing the world. On the basis of these, words have different collocation. Just as an example, a Chinese phrase “看”has several equivalent expression in English as “read”, “watch”, “look ”, “see” and so on. When we speak Chinese “看报”，the equal phrases we used in English is “read newspaper” but not “see newspaper” or “watch newspaper”. We used “watch” in combination “watch TV” or “watch movie” and “see” in “see you”.