袁向寧

（山東建筑大學 山東 濟南 250101）

1 What is collocation?

Many years ago,J.R Firth defines collocation as the company words keep’-their relationships with other words.Another definition might be the way words combine in predictable ways.When we think of the number of words in English,the number of potential combinations runs into many millions.

Each word has its own meaning which is not only defined in dictionary but also the meaning in a phrase.We need know both meanings of a word.

We know many expressions of the words which are heard frequently in our daily life.So we just keep them in mind as“one word”.For example,“Crystal clear”,and also some “compound noun”,like “riding boots” or “motor cyclist”.These expressions that are one kind of collocated pairs of words are used everyday by us which have already been fixed like “one word”.

In language teaching,collocation is a very interesting area,because they can be found in many parts of the language studying,such as in a syntactic relation,lexical relation,or they can be in no linguistically defined relation.Knowing collocations well is a key point to use well of a language.Sometimes,we can not just judge a sentence only though whether its grammar is right or not.

“Heavy smokers”:it is definitely a standard collocation.We may analyze it from two aspects.Firstly,the word “heavy”has a different meaning in each of the following situations.Such as:

A heavy drinker(this “heavy” means indulging to a great degree in drink).

Heavy bread(this “heavy” means insufficiently leavened).

A heavy going or a heavy reading(this “heavy”means Hard to do or accomplish;Arduous).

A heavy rainfall(this “heavy” means Large in yield or output).

Secondly,the reason why we use “heavy smoker” whereas“big” or “massive” collocates with “smoker” that is because meaning cannot always account for collocational patterning.(Baker,2000)collocation in terms of the tendency of certain words to co-occur regularly in a given language.

From the above example,we may notice that the collocation is a group of words combined for the common usage.The meaning of the individual word may usually be understood by people.There is a boundary of the change which we can make a combination of words.Sometimes the boundary may be very strict such as “heavy smokers”,but in some cases the words are more freedom to be chosen which we can make them together.

2 Collocation classification

2.1 Less fixed combinations

These are very common in English.In such cases,we have more freedom to make combinations,but there are certain restrictions on what is possible or probable.We use different meaning of “make” to describe the condition.We make more money paragraph 5(To gain or earn,as by working)/make verses(To compose)/make a telephone call(To carry out;Perform):make laws(To institute or establish;Enact)/made a field goal.(To score or achieve,as in a sport)/make believe(to pretend).

So we can see that there are many approaches of combining make with nouns.There are some limits to a series of collocations they have and they may not often use the same collocates.

2.2 Other common grammatical combinations

There are no clear rules for why certain adjective go with certain nouns,they just do.“Collocation is the readily observable phenomenon whereby certain words co-occur in natural text with greater than random frequency”.（Lewis，1997） Collocation has three characteristics they are:co-occur,readily observable and the patterns of collocations are largely arbitrary and independent of meaning.

1）Some collocation is fixing,such as:heavy smokers.When you plan to describe the degree of indulging of a smoker,you may not change any word of this collocation.The same situation occurred to:to catch a cold，rancid butter，drug addict.

2）Some other collocation can change a part of words.Such as:scared to death (afraid)in paragraph 5 and:blood/close/distant/near（west）relative.These kinds of collocation are flexible to change a part of combination.(Lewis,1993).

3 Problems related to collocation in translation

A translator can easily misinterpret a collocation in the source text because interference from people’s native language.This happens when a source-language collocation occurs to be familiar and it corresponds in form to a common collocation in the target language.

The boundary of combination of words in collocation is as wide as that we can feel free to make words together,but it is not unbounded.In some cases,some words must be collated with the certain words and they can not be changed.If some Chinese students who do not know these collocations,they will make mistakes when they translate Chinese phrases into English.For example,we can not translate “人山人?！眛his Chinese phrase which means huge crowd of people into people mountain people sea because“人”is people,“山”is mountain and“海”is sea in English.

4 Collocational range and Cultural-specific collocation

Two main factors can influence the collocation range of an item (Beekman and Callow,1974). “The first is its level of specificity:the more general a word is,the broader its collocational range;the more specific it is,the more restricted its collocational range”. “the second factor which determines the collocational range of an item is the number of senses it has.”Most words have a lot of senses and they trend to obtain a different set of collocates for each sense.No collocation is impossible.Collocation ranges are not fixed.

These collocations also reflect the background of cultures.If the source and target languages have the significantly different in background of cultures,there will be a big gap when the translator tries to translate the source text to target text.In this case,the translator will give the wrong meaning of the collocation and the target reader should get the misconception of the collocation.

5 Conclusion

To sum up,this paper mainly explained what collocation is in English from the source text examples,as well as the analysis of the collocation and classification of different collocation.

［1］Beekman,John,and John Callow.Translating the Word of God[J].Grand Rapids,MI:Zondervan,1974.

［2］Cowie,A.P.The Treatment of Collocations and Idioms in Learners’Dictionaries[J].Applied Linguistics,1981，2(3)：223-235.

［3］Jack C.Richards,John Platt,Heidi Platt.Longman Dictionary of Language teaching and Applied Linguistics,Longman Group UK Limited[M].2nd Ed.1992.

［4］Jimmie Hill.Revising priorities:from grammatical failure to collocati on success[A]//Lewis Michael.Teaching Collocation[C].Hove:LTP,2000：47-67.