Published Paper Details:

Choosing how wide to cast the net in the search for pertinent papers presents perhaps the biggest problem in developing a research timeline on teaching and learning collocation. For one issue, not all (applied) linguists and practitioners agree on what is meant by the term "collocation." Another example is that things that are classified as collocations in one study could be given a different name in another. The term "collocation" refers to the method in which words in the English language are naturally combined. Knowing which words collide is crucial (commonly go together). This method focuses mostly on the co-occurrence of words, or how words "partner" with one another. But can taking into account their semantic characteristics improve our comprehension of collocations? Since there appear to be three forms of collocation from a meaning-focused standpoint, we think teachers should pay attention to more than simply the literal pairing of words (Macis and Schmitt, 1). Collocation is the term used to describe the above-chance co-occurrence of two words in the field of corpus linguistics. One of the existing measures of collocational strength, such as the mutual information (MI) score, can be used to quantify the likelihood that two words would co-occur in a corpus within a specific period of dialogue. The stronger the word relationship or collocation, the higher the score. Word substitutions that cause cooccurrences to deviate from the norm (e.g., using very religious instead of deeply religious) will typically stand out as unusual or "non-idiomatic" (idiomatic in the sense of "combining words like a native speaker") (Boers et al., 1). Regardless of how they are understood, collocations are a subclass of set phrases. Set phrases are extremely important because people speak in set phrases rather than in isolated words. However, fixed phrases, or phrasemes, pose one of the main challenges in theoretical linguistics as well as in the creation of dictionaries. Collocations are described by Nesselhauf as "a type of word combination in a certain grammatical pattern" and are used to refer to "an abstract unit of language and its instantiations in texts" (Akinci et al., 2)