kollocations

Kollocations, frequently called collocations in English-language linguistics, refer to the habitual co-occurrence of words. A collocation is a sequence of two or more words that appear together more often than expected by chance, contributing to the natural feel of the language.

Collocations span various word classes, including noun–adjective, verb–noun, and adverb–adjective combinations. Examples include strong coffee, make a decision, heavy rain, and take a shower. Some collocations are highly fixed, sometimes bordering on idiomatic expressions, while others are flexible and open to variation (for example, make a decision vs. make a choice). Distinguishing collocations from idioms can be nuanced: idioms often convey figurative meaning that cannot be deduced from the individual words, whereas many collocations retain literal sense.

In corpus linguistics, collocations are identified using statistical measures that indicate association strength, such as mutual information, t-score, likelihood ratio, or Dice coefficient. Researchers examine large text corpora to find word pairs or groups that occur together more frequently than expected under random distribution, within a defined window of surrounding words.

Applications include language teaching and learning, where awareness of natural collocations helps learners produce fluent, idiomatic speech; lexicography and dictionaries, which often annotate common collocations; and natural language processing, where collocation information improves tasks like parsing, indexing, and machine translation. Understanding kollocations supports more natural language use and helps distinguish idiomatic expressions from freely combining words.