Describing language
together in pairs of groups, as this excerpt from the novel Small Island by Andrea Levy (about Jamaican immigrants to Britain ) makes clear: Louis now believed bloodyforeigner to be all one word. For, like bosom pals, he only ever heard those words spoken together.
We will look at three specific instances of words that group together: collocations, lexical chunks and idiom.
Collocations If any two words occur together more often than just by chance, we often call them collocations. In other words, when you hear the word ‘asleep’ there is a good chance that the word ‘fast’ will be used with it (‘fast asleep’). In the example above, Louis has worked out that if he hears the word ‘pals’, the word ‘bosom’ will be hovering around, too, and he never hears the word ‘foreigner’ occurring w ithout ‘bloody’ in front of it. Knowledge of collocation is an im portant part of knowing a word. For example, the Longman Dictionary o f Contemporary English (LDOCE) lists the following collocations for the word ‘heavy’, when it means ‘great in am ount, degree or severity’: heavy traffic, heavy rain/snow, heavy fighting, heavy drinker, heavy smoking, heavy smoker, heavy burden, heavy demands, heavy pressure, heavy fine, heavy casualties, heavy losses, heavy defeat, heavy cold, heavy use. The reason for this listing is that even though ‘heavy’ (with this meaning) may sometimes be used with other words, a study of language shows that it is most often found in the company of the words indicated (traffic, demands, casualties, etc). Furthermore, even though this meaning of ‘heavy’ is not unlike the word ‘big’, we do not often find ‘big’ collocating with words like ‘smoker’ and ‘casualties’. The compilers of LDOCE (and other dictionaries) can be confident about these issues because they have studied large computer corpuses (collections of articles, novels, recorded speech, journals, etc stored electronically). These corpuses (and the software which allows them to be analysed) were developed towards the end of the twentieth century - and this development process is still ongoing. Corpuses allow us to have a much clearer idea of when and how often word collocations occur.
Lexical chunks Corpuses have shown us something else we have always been aware of - but which is now more demonstrably the case. This is that words group together into longer lexical phrases or lexical chunks. Lexical chunks are strings of words which behave almost as one unit. Some of these are fixed (which means you can’t change any of the words, e.g. over the moon, out o f the blue), and some of them are semi-fixed (which means you can change some of the words, e.g. nice to see you/good to see you/great to see you, etc). O ur ability to use the language effectively depends largely on a knowledge of lexical chunking of this kind. In certain varieties of English, for example, speakers may well use phrases like ‘It’s a safe bet t h a t ...’ to preface a strong speculation, or ‘I wouldn’t go that far’ to show only partial agreement. Lexical chunks become more or less problematic depending on how idiomatic they are. An idiom is a lexical phrase where the meaning of the whole phrase may not be comprehensible even if we know the meaning of each individual word (e.g. ‘full of beans’ = energetic, ‘as plain as the nose on your face’ = obvious). Many phrasal and multi-word verbs cause problems for learners precisely because they are idiomatic in this way. We 75