sanapareita

Sanapareita, or word pairs, are two or more words that frequently occur together in natural language use. They are a major topic in phraseology and corpus linguistics and refer to lexical units whose meaning or usage cannot be fully deduced from the individual words alone. Sanapareita can be fixed expressions whose form is largely stable, such as idioms or proverbs, or semi-fixed collocations where words can change within constraints (for example verbs that commonly pair with a noun).

Common Finnish examples include fixed collocations like "tehdä päätös" (to make a decision), "ottaa huomioon" (to take into account) and "antaa periksi" (to yield). These phrases function as cohesive units in discourse and are often learned as chunks by language learners. In contrast, semi-fixed pairs may allow substitutions that preserve meaning, such as replacing one adjective in a typical adjective-noun combination.

In research, sanapareita are identified from large text corpora using statistical measures of co-occurrence strength, such as mutual information or t-score, and are used to improve lexical resources, language teaching, and natural language processing applications like machine translation and language modeling. The term also arises in dictionaries and learner resources that present common collocations to help learners acquire natural-sounding language.