English collocations: Past and present

Abstract

Most lexical items in the lexicon of a language enter a wide variety of structurally diverse co-occurrences. Collocation, which refers to syntagmatic lexical relations in a language, is one of the most important and frequent aspects of formulaic language. It is language specific and has certain features that differ it from other languages, this being also affected by the cultural differences among languages. Collocation is a term which is problematic to define. It is used and understood in many ways, and linguists through their varying definitions and explorations of the term have cemented their meanings. Collocations have always been of interest to linguists, among others distinguished British linguists, whose research has contributed to building the collocation terminology, to delimitation and understanding of collocations as units of formulaic language, and to their practical applications. The paper provides an overview of collocation studies in the English language environment from the early use of the term to present-day research and its applications. It follows upon and updates the research done on this topic as a part of my dissertation thesis (Drabkova 2008), with the purpose of revealing if and to what extent the approach to collocations has changed over time, especially with the advent and use of powerful computers which have enabled a much wider, faster and precise processing, analysis and description of the input data regarding collocations withdrawn from corpora.