noncollocational

Noncollocational is a term used in linguistics and lexicography to describe words or expressions that do not form a stable, restricted set of neighboring words. It contrasts with collocations, which are predictable pairings or groupings that occur together more often than would be expected by chance. A noncollocational item therefore shows weak, diffuse, or highly context-dependent associations with surrounding language.

In corpus-based analysis, collocation strength is assessed with statistics such as mutual information, t-score, or likelihood ratios. Noncollocational items tend to yield low association scores and exhibit broad dispersion of contexts, meaning their neighboring words vary across genres, domains, and usage situations. The degree of noncollocation can depend on word class, frequency, and domain specificity; some terms are inherently flexible and attract a wide variety of companions.

Understanding noncollocational patterns is important for lexicography, language teaching, and natural language processing. Dictionaries and teaching materials often emphasize common collocations for natural speech, while recognizing noncollocational terms helps explain why some words appear with many different neighbors. Because noncollocationality can be domain-sensitive, a term may be noncollocational in general language but form stable associations within a specialized corpus.