Kolloktsioonid

Kolloktsioonid are combinations of words that frequently occur together in a language. The phenomenon is studied in linguistics, language teaching, natural language processing and lexical semantics. Collocations maintain a fixed order and frequency that makes them distinct from random pairings; they can be adjective‑verb ("strong wind"), verb‑object ("make a decision"), noun‑noun ("coffee shop"), and many other patterns. Estonian collocations (kolloktsioonid) are similar to those in other European languages but also exhibit language‑specific tendencies, such as the use of compound nouns to express specialised concepts.

Functions of collocations include lexical cohesion in a text, ease of processing for readers and speakers, and the preservation of cultural and domain knowledge. They play a key role in language acquisition: learners succeed when they can produce and recognise regular collocational patterns. In NLP, collocation detection often relies on statistical measures such as pointwise mutual information, t‑test or log‑likelihood, and words that exceed a certain threshold are treated as lexical units for machine translation, information retrieval and semantic search.

Distinguishing collocations from idioms: idioms are fixed expressions with figurative meaning that cannot be inferred from component words. Collocations may be semi‑fixed and allow some lexical variation (e.g., "strong reaction" vs. "powerful reaction"). Methods for identifying collocations include co‑occurrence counts, entropy measures and supervised machine learning models. Knowledge of collocations informs vocabulary teaching, corpus linguistics and the development of lexical databases such as WordNet and Estonian RTE‑Lexicon.