语料库语言学视野下搭配的定义与分类

语料库语言学视野下搭配的定义与分类

［Abstract］Corpus-based linguistics opens a new field for linguistic research.In this paper，the definition of collocation will be introduced as well as the classification of collocations.

［Key words］collocation，definition，classification

I. Introduction

The appearance of corpus linguistics opens a new field for collocation. Researchers set up a pattern of conceptual system，adopt a series of methods and techniques to get information，deal with data and describe collocability. Collocation can be defined and classified in many different ways.

Ⅱ. Definition of Collocation

“Collocation runs through the whole of the English language. No piece of natural spoken or written English is totally free of collocation.” (Crowther，2001：iv)

Because of its unusual role in natural languages，collocation study has received much attention in the last half century，and is now increasingly becoming one of focuses of modern linguistic research. Firth (1957：12)，the father of collocation study，states：“you shall know

a word by the company it keeps”. His statement suggests that collocations are mainly realized in the form of lexical co-occurrence，which in fact，is a semantic mode，and implies that lexical items in collocations tend to expect and predict mutually (Yang，2002：84). Then actually what is collocation? Over the past five decades，collocation was defined in different ways (Wei，2002：101).

In broad sense，Halliday (1976：25) states “lexis seems to require the recognition merely of linear co-occurrence together with some measure of significant proximity，either a scale or at least a cutoff point. It is this syntagmatic relation which is referred to as ‘collocation’…” In contrast，collocation in narrow sense takes grammatical factors into account，as Kjellmer put it，“A collocation is a sequence of words that occur more than once in identical form and which is grammatically well-structured” (1987：133). It means that，apart from lexical co-occurrence，a collocation must be grammatically well-structured. Wray (2002：51) have suggested that words，like “prefabricated”，“pre-constructed”，“pre-determined” or “chunks” could be very often found，among which collocation is “the readily observable phenomenon whereby certain words co-occur in natural text with greater than random frequency” and it is not determined by logic or frequency not any rules；it is arbitrary and decided only by linguistic conventions. Sinclair (1991) suggests that “collocation is the occurrence of two or more words within

a short space of e ach in a text” (ibid：170). Cowie (1994)，however，takes grammatical structure into consideration and suggests that “associations of two or more lexemes recognized in and defined by their occurrence in a specific range of grammatical construction” (ibid：3169). Cater (1998) proposes that “a group of words which occur repeatedly in a language” (ibid：51).

Through the bewildering amount of researches，different definitions and descriptions on what is collocation have been presented from slightly varying perspectives. Wei (2001：107) comes up with a more comprehensive one：“a collocation is a conventional syntagmatic association of a string of lexical items which co-occur in a grammatical construct with mutual expectancy greater than chance as realization of me aning in text.” “A significant collocation is one in which the two items co-occur more than could be predicted on the basis of their respective frequencies in the length of the text under consideration” (Martin，1983：84).

In the research based on corpus，there are mainly three methods to test the significance of the collocations：(1) the computation of the frequency of co-occurrence of the node and the collocate；(2) the computation of MI (mutual information) score of the co-occurrence words；(3) the computation of z-score of the co-occurrence words (Deng