collocation

Collocation refers to the habitual co-occurrence of words in language use. It describes how certain words tend to pair with specific partners more often than would be expected by chance. Collocations are a feature of natural speech and writing and can be productive and flexible, not merely fixed phrases. They influence the naturalness of expression and the choices available to speakers and writers.

Common types include lexical collocations such as adjective + noun (strong tea, heavy rain), verb + noun (make a decision, take a walk), and noun + noun (data analysis, traffic jam). Other patterns include verb + adverb (speak fluently) and preposition + noun (in trouble). Collocations differ from idioms and other fixed expressions in that the individual words retain their ordinary meanings, and the pairings can often be varied within acceptable limits while preserving the implied sense.

Collocation is a central concept in lexicon and corpus linguistics. While some collocations are highly fixed, many allow slight modification without losing acceptability, which contributes to fluency and versatility in language use. Understanding collocations helps learners produce more natural-sounding text and speech, and it informs teaching, testing, and lexical resources such as collocation dictionaries.

Studying collocations typically involves corpus analysis and statistical measures of co-occurrence, such as frequency, mutual information, or other association metrics. Researchers use concordances and word sketches to identify strong collocations, while learners encounter collocations through exposure and practice with authentic language data.