liaafriani

A collocation is a familiar grouping of words, especially words that habitually appear together and thereby convey meaning by association.

Collocational range refers to the set of items that typically accompany a word. The size of a collocational range is partially determined by a word's level of specificity and number of meanings. 

A collocation is made up of two or more words that are commonly used together in English. Think of collocations as words that usually go together. There are different kinds of collocations in English. Strong collocations are word pairings that are expected to come together. 

Good collocation examples of this type of word pairing are combinations with 'make' and 'do'. You make a cup of tea, but do your homework. Collocations are very common in business settings when certain nouns are routinely combined with certain verbs or adjectives. For example, draw up a contract, set a price, conduct negotiations, etc.

Here are a number of common collocations in English:

make the bed -> I need to make the bed everyday.
do the homework -> My son does his homework after dinner.
take a risk -> Some people don't take enough risks in life.
give someone advice -> The teacher gave us some advice on taking tests.

Why Do Words Collocate?

There is often no reason for a collocation. People just put certain words together more often than they put other words together. In fact, the use of collocations has become popular in English and language teaching because of corpus linguistics. Corpus linguistics study huge volumes of data of spoken and written English to come up with statistics on how often people use certain words and word combinations. Through this study, corpus linguistics has been able to define what are strong and weak collocations.

Strong Collocations

Strong collocations refer to words that almost always go together. It's possible that people might understand you if you don't use a strong collocation. However, if you do not use a strong collocation it will sound funny to native speakers.

 Let's return to our example of 'make' and 'do'.

 If you say:

I did a cup of coffee.

native speakers will understand that you mean:

I made a cup of coffee.

Correct use of strong collocations shows an excellent command of the English language, and can certainly help impress native speakers' of your ability to speak English well. Of course, if you are speaking to other non-native speakers the ability to use collocations correctly all the time becomes less important. That doesn't mean that correct collocation use is not important, it's just not AS important as something like correct tense. Image for a moment that you are speaking about a future meeting:

Our meeting was on Friday at four o'clock.
I've done an appointment at four o'clock for the meeting room on Friday.

In both of these sentences, there are mistakes. However, in the first sentence instead of using a future tense, the past tense is used. If you want your colleagues to come to the meeting, this mistake is very serious and will lead to no one coming to the meeting.

In the second sentence 'do an appointment' is a misuse of a strong collocation. However, the meaning is clear: You have scheduled a room at four o'clock. In this case, a mistake in collocations is not nearly as important as a mistake in tense usage.


















references :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation
 http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/collocationterm.htm
http://esl.about.com/od/intermediate-collocations/f/What-Is-Collocation.htm
http://esl.about.com/od/engilshvocabulary/a/collocations.htm