Day #175 — Silly little things called COLLOCATIONS S01E09 — Go sideways
The more you look at COLLOCATIONS and how words co-occur, the more you realize that the combinations are not limited to the word to the immediate right or left. In other words, we lose out on the relationships words have with each other. By going sideways — expanding on the word + word match — we begin to see how syntax (the rules that govern the control some words have on others) lexis (the complete set of all possible words in a language) come together to establish meaning.
Here’s what you end up learning in the process of going sideways:
1. Learning language by lists gives you tunnel vision
2. Collocations are actually not that difficult to learn (if the range of a word is extended beyond its immediate neighbor)
3. Learning in chunks does seem to have more benefits than drawbacks (so Michael Lewis, 1993 was right!)
4. Learning two or more adjectives in a row is not more difficult than learning only one (long live adjective order, aka OSASCOMP)
5. Exploring how words collocate and colligate does not compel us to learn everything. There is a difference what we are exposed to (INPUT) and what we are able to retain (INTAKE).
To exemplify, the use of COULD or WOULD in the phrase to request politely, “I was wondering if you …” attests to the arbitrary nature of language. For starters, a separate search on the Corpus of Contemporary American English with each reveals that their uss is not as formal as we might think or that their occurrence is limited to academic or professional registers, so to speak.
TV/Media is the runaway favorite for both phrases, making them more neutral and regular in use than we thought. What raises keen interest in collocation and colligation is a look at what happens to the right or to the left of the phrase, as shown here.
For the sake of this post, we can see that certain words have a magnetic attraction to others, making meaning real as much as possible.There is much more — go left or right to find more.
Originally published at http://dablog-dablog.blogspot.com on June 23, 2020.
