Colligation

Colligation is a term in linguistics describing the systematic association of a word with a particular grammatical environment or set of syntactic constraints. It focuses on the patterns of grammatical complements or frames that a word tends to require or permit, i.e., its subcategorization or valency, rather than on the broader semantic co-occurrence of words. In this sense, colligation analyzes how a word behaves within sentence structure and with respect to its surrounding part of speech and function.

Typical colligation patterns include verb constructions with specific infinitival or gerund complements, adjectives that govern particular prepositions, and nouns that regularly pair with certain prepositional phrases. For example, the verb decide commonly collocates with the to-infinitive (decide to leave), the adjective afraid typically governs of + noun (afraid of spiders), and the noun reason often combines with for + noun (a reason for leaving). These patterns illustrate how a word’s behavior is constrained by grammatical context rather than by the presence of specific neighboring words alone.

Colligation is a concept used in corpus linguistics, lexicography, and grammar research to describe and model the syntactic profiles of words. It complements the study of collocation by emphasizing grammatical environment and subcategorization frames. Analyzing collocations and colligations together helps in understanding a word’s usage, informs dictionary entries, and supports language teaching and natural language processing. See also collocation, subcategorization frame, and syntactic valency.