Kombinationspartnern

Kombinationspartnern is a term used in linguistics to describe the words that most commonly combine with another word in a language. In corpus linguistics and lexicography, these words are often referred to as collocates or combination partners. The concept captures how words tend to occur together in fixed expressions or typical syntactic patterns, reflecting semantic and syntactic preferences rather than random co-occurrence.

Identifying Kombinationspartnern involves analyzing large text corpora and measuring the strength of association between word pairs. Common statistical approaches include mutual information, log-likelihood, and t-scores. The resulting partner sets can vary by genre, register, and domain, making the selection of Kombinationspartnern context-dependent.

Examples illustrate typical patterns. For the noun decision (Entscheidung), common Kombinationspartnern include adjectives such as schwer (eine schwere Entscheidung) or wichtig (eine wichtige Entscheidung), and verbs like treffen (eine Entscheidung treffen). For verbs like treffen, frequent Kombinationspartnern might include nouns and prepositional phrases that specify the object or context.

Applications of studying Kombinationspartnern include lexicography, where learners and translators benefit from listing common collocations; language teaching, which emphasizes natural phraseology; and natural language processing, where accurate modeling of collocations improves language understanding and generation.

Relation to Kollokation: in practice, Kombinationspartnern are closely related to Kollokationen, though some researchers distinguish between broad co-occurrence partners and statistically strong collocations. Limitations arise from data dependence: results can differ across corpora, languages, or domains, and may change over time.