Going Beyond Patterns: Involving Cognitive Analysis in the Learning of Collocations

For those working in languageteaching and lexicography e.g., Bahns & Eldaw, 1993; Benson, 1989;Keshavarz & Salimi, 2007; Lewis, 2002; Nesselhauf, 2003; Willis, 2003,collocation means pri

Going Beyond Patterns: Involving Cognitive Analysis in the Learning of CollocationsDILIN LIU

University of Alabama

Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States

Since the late 1980s, collocations have received increasing attention inapplied linguistics, especially language teaching, as is evidenced by themany publications on the topic These works fall roughly into two lines ofresearch (a) those focusing on the identification and use of collocations(Benson, 1989; Hunston, 2002; Hunston & Francis, 2000; Smadja &McKeown, 1991; Wouden, 1997) and (b) those focusing on the learningand teaching of collocations, including the development of referencebooks and textbooks (Bahns & Eldaw, 1993; Benson, Benson, & Ilson,1997; Crowther, Dignen, & Lea, 2002; Hill & Lewis, 2002; Keshavarz &Salimi, 2007; Lewis, 2000, 2002; McCarthy & O’Dell, 2005; Nesselhauf,2003; O’Dell & McCarthy, 2008; Sun & Wang, 2003; Webb & Kagimoto,2009) Although these publications have greatly enhanced our under-standing of collocations and their role learning and teaching, a close look

at them indicates a lack of critical examination of the definition and thenature of collocations and the way collocations are taught This articleaims to address the issue through (a) a close critical examination of thecollocations in existing teaching or reference materials and the typicalway they are taught and (b) a corpus-based analysis of some representativecollocations On the basis of the examination and analysis, the articleargues for a more effective pedagogical approach to collocations thatinvolves corpus-based cognitive analysis of collocations

doi: 10.5054/tq.2010.214046

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

What Constitutes a Collocation? An Examination of Definitions

To begin with, it is necessary to note that the discussion of thedefinition of collocation here is not meant as a thorough review but only abrief overview of the issue from a language-teaching perspective.1 It is

1 For example, this overview does not cover recent psycholinguistic and natural language processing research Although such research has provided evidence for the existence of certain combinations of words as lexical units, it does not have direct bearing on the issue I address in the article: Whether collocations are generally arbitrary.

well known that ‘‘what goes under the header of ‘collocation’ is veryheterogeneous’’ (Wouden, 1997, p 53) The meaning of the term oftenvaries, depending on one’s research purpose and theoretical orienta-tion Yet a closer look at the term shows that its various uses boil downbasically to two major meanings The first is the uncountable use of theterm referring to a linguistic property—‘‘the tendency for certain words

to occur together’’ (Finch, 2000, p 152), that is, to co-occur more oftenthan by chance The second is the countable use of the term referring tospecific habitual combinations of words that are often treated as lexicalitems or units The first meaning is a much broader concept, because itcovers not only the habitual combinations of words but also the issue ofcollocation in cases where the lexical items that often co-occur do notform lexical units For example, ‘‘the word toy co-occurs with childrenmore frequently than with women and men [because] toys belong tochildren, on the whole, rather than adults’’ (Hunston, 2002, p 68).However, although toy and children often co-occur, they do not form ahabitual combination as a lexical unit Their co-occurrence can only beconsidered a collocation issue in the broad sense defined by Sinclair(1991): ‘‘Collocation is the occurrence of two or more words within ashort space of each other in a text (p 170).’’

This broader use of the term seems to be of interest only to thosescholars working on lexicogrammatical patternings (e.g., Hunston, 2002;Hunston & Francis, 2000; Sinclair, 1991) For those working in languageteaching and lexicography (e.g., Bahns & Eldaw, 1993; Benson, 1989;Keshavarz & Salimi, 2007; Lewis, 2002; Nesselhauf, 2003; Willis, 2003),collocation means primarily habitual combinations of words, such as do(not make) laundry and make (not do) a case, although these scholars donot always agree on what types of habitual combinations may beconsidered collocations Language educators’ primary interest inhabitual combination is best evidenced by their emphasis on thecollocatability or restrictions on how words can be combined Forexample, according to Richards, Platt, and Webber (1985, p 46), thestudy of collocations focuses on ‘‘the restrictions of how words can beused together, for example which prepositions are used with particularverbs and which verbs and nouns are used together.’’

Obviously, it makes good sense for language educators to focus onhabitual collocations and exclude co-occurrences of words that are nothabitual combinations, because the latter type does not have muchpedagogical value However, as already mentioned, language educatorscurrently do not have a consensus on what types of word combinationsqualify as collocations They often cannot agree on how fixed instructure and how transparent in meaning a word combination must be

in order to be considered a collocation (Fernando, 1996; Nesselhauf,2003) For some scholars, a collocation is fairly fixed in structure, but for

others it can have considerable variation In terms of semantictransparency, most scholars (e.g., Fernando, 1996; Moon, 1998;Nesselhauf, 2003) believe that collocations are fairly transparent andthus should not include idioms, although a few (e.g., Palmer, 1933;Wouden, 1997) consider idioms to be collocations Despite thedivergent views, most language educators appear to agree thatcollocations are those word combinations that have restricted structuralvariation and differ from entirely free word combinations on the onehand and idioms on the other (Bahns & Eldaw, 1993; Crowther, Dignen,

& Lea, 2002; McCarthy & O’Dell, 2005 ; Nesselhauf, 2003; O’Dell &McCarthy, 2008) Collocations so defined are, using Moon’s (1998)terminology, ‘‘restricted collocations’’ (p 27) or, in Fernando’s (1996)words, ‘‘habitual collocations’’ with ‘‘restricted variance’’ (p 32) Yeteven with this narrow definition of collocation, it is often still difficult todecide whether specific word combinations are collocations This isbecause the key element in the definition is ‘‘restricted variation’’ and,when used to identify collocations, it is not a binary yes-or-no criterionbut rather one of scale (see Nesselhauf, 2003, p 225) To help alleviatethe problem, some scholars have divided collocations into scaledsubcategories, for example, ‘‘strong,’’ ‘‘medium strength,’’ and ‘‘weak’’(Crowther, Dignen, & Lea, 2002, p vii) or ‘‘fixed,’’ ‘‘strong,’’ and ‘‘weak’’(O’Dell & McCarthy, 2008, p 8)

Are Collocations Arbitrary? Clarification of Key Terms

A major issue related to the definition of collocations that is ofparticular importance for this article is whether collocations arearbitrary A quick look at the literature on the issue seems to suggestthat many linguists and language educators consider collocationsarbitrary For example, Benson (1989) contends that ‘‘collocationsshould be defined not just as ‘recurrent word combinations,’ but as

‘arbitrary recurrent word combinations’’’ (p 3) Similarly, Smadja andMcKeown (1991) believe that ‘‘[a] collocation is an arbitrary recurrentword combination’’ (p 230) Lewis (2002) also sees collocations thesame way: ‘‘Collocation, as I have shown, is arbitrary: high/tall building;tall boy but not *high boy Prices rise and fall; you can rise to the occasion butnot *fall to the occasion’’ (p 26) Likewise, Nesselhauf (2003) uses

‘‘arbitrary restriction on substitutability’’ (p 225) as the key feature indefining collocations In a similar vein, other scholars have used wordslike ‘‘unmotivated’’ and ‘‘unpredictable/unpredictability’’ in definingcollocations (e.g., Chan & Liou, 2005, p 231; Hunston, 2002, p 86;Nation, 2001, p 317) Given the prominence of the issue in this article, it

is important that researchers accurately understand what the scholars

mean by the use of the word arbitrary (and its related terms unmotivatedand unpredictable) and to what extent they believe collocations arearbitrary.

A scrutiny of the scholars’ discussions, including their explanations ofwhy they consider collocations arbitrary, suggests that there are at leastthree different perspectives or meanings in the use of arbitrary The firstone views collocations as arbitrary from a cross-linguistic perspective,

as shown in Benson’s (1989) support for his argument aboutcollocations’ arbitrariness:

The arbitrary (as opposed to free) nature of collocations can be strated when they are juxtaposed with corresponding collocations in otherlanguages For example, when referring to a police officer whose duty it is

demon-to keep traffic moving, one says in French r gler la circulation, in German —den Verkehr regeln (p 3)

The interlanguage comparisons given in the quote clearly illustrateBenson’s cross-linguistic perspective on the issue The second perspec-tive is an intralinguistic one, which sees collocations’ arbitrariness interms of their syntactic and semantic abnormality, as expressed clearly bySmadja and McKeown (1991):

A collocation is arbitrary because it cannot be predicted by syntactic orsemantic rules For example, ‘strong’ and ‘powerful’ are both adjectives andare synonymous in meaning, but ‘strong’ is used to modify ‘tea’ and

‘powerful’ to modify ‘car’ and not vice versa (p 230)

A strong version of this intralinguistic view is that the meaning of acollocation cannot be derived from the meanings of the words in it.Instead, its meaning is a unit of meaning arising out of the collocation inand of itself In this view, strong tea or powerful car is a unique linguisticunit whose meaning is noncomposite Of course, not all of those whohold the intralinguistic perspective on collocations’ arbitrariness sharethis view, at least not completely Some do not consider noncompositemeaning to be a feature of collocations (Bahns & Eldaw, 1993; McCarthy

& O’Dell, 2005; Nesselhauf, 2003) To them, noncomposite meaning is adistinctive feature of idioms only, that is, it distinguishes idioms fromcollocations There are still others who either think there is only acertain degree of noncomposite meaning in collocations or believe onlysome collocations are noncomposite in meaning (Crowther, Dignen, &Lea, 2002; Nation, 2001)

The third perspective approaches the arbitrariness of collocationsboth as a language-processing and a language-learning issue, as can beseen in Lewis’ (2002) comment after he supported his argument about

the arbitrariness of collocations with the examples of tall but not *high boyand rise but not *fall to the occasion: ‘‘This non-generalisability clearlyindicates that we meet and store words in the prefabricated chunks uponwhich the Lexical Approach is based’’ (p 26) Of course, Lewis’perspective can be considered a combination of the first and the second,because it encompasses both the cross-linguistic view (i.e., learning asecond language [L2] using his Lexical Approach) and the intralinguisticview (i.e., collocations are prefabricated and unsuitable for normallanguage processing) Like Lewis, most L2 educators appear to use theterm arbitrary in the combined sense (e.g., Keshavarz & Salimi, 2007;Nesselhauf, 2003), because, in their discussion about collocation learning,they all point out both the problem of semantic arbitrariness in the choice

of words in collocations and the special difficulty such arbitrarinesspresents to L2 learners Nation’s (2001) definition of collocations bestrepresents this two-sense view: ‘‘From a learning point of view, it makes sense

to regard collocations as items which frequently occur together and havesome degree of semantic unpredictability’’ (emphasis added, p 317)

Next, the terms unmotivated and unpredictable are discussed It seemsthat these terms are synonymous with arbitrary, because they are oftenused to define or portray the arbitrariness of collocations An excellentexample is found in Smadja and McKeown’s (1991) explanation quotedearlier: ‘‘A collocation is arbitrary because it cannot be predicted bysyntactic or semantic rules’’ (underscoring added, p 230) Compared withunmotivated, unpredictable is used much more widely, perhaps because itcan be used in both the cross-linguistic and intralinguistic senses; that is,collocations can be unpredictable either because of their difference fromother languages or because of their semantic and/or syntactic uncon-ventionality In contrast, unmotivated is generally used in the intralinguisticsense because, when researchers say a collocation is semanticallyunmotivated, they mean there is no clear reason for the selection of thewords in the combination based on the meanings Of course, when L2speakers consider a collocation unmotivated, it can become a cross-linguistic issue, if they base their decision on the meanings of the words intheir first language (L1) rather than in the L2, but making a decision inthis manner is not really valid, a point I discuss in detail later

Concerning the extent to which these scholars believe collocations arearbitrary, my examination suggests a substantial variation, but their viewscan be divided roughly into two major groups The first holds the view thatcollocations are all arbitrary, although their degree of arbitrariness mayvary (e.g., Benson, 1989; Nesselhauf, 2003; Smadja & McKeown, 1991).The second group takes the position that not all collocations are arbitrary(e.g., Crowther, Dignen, & Lea, 2002; McCarthy & O’Dell, 2005)

It is also important to note that many educators’ belief thatcollocations are arbitrary can be seen in their discussion about how

collocations should be taught For example, as early as the first part of thelast century, Palmer (1933) argued that each collocation ‘‘must or should

be learnt, or is best or most conveniently learnt as an integral whole orindependent entity, rather than by the process of piecing together theircomponent parts’’ (p 4) The same view is still held by many today In adiscussion about collocation teaching, Lewis (2000) writes,

Collocations are not words which we, in some sense, ‘put together,’ theyoccur naturally, and the first task of the language teacher is to ensure thatthey are not unnecessarily taken apart in the classroom the words [of acollocation] should be recorded together (p 132)

In the same vein, Hill (2000) suggests that collocations should be learned

in such a way that ‘‘we can retrieve them from our mental lexicon just as wepull a phone number or address from our memory’’ (p 53)

However, recent cognitive and corpus-based research appears tosuggest that even those collocations that have been used as classicexamples to illustrate the arbitrariness of collocations might not bearbitrary from an intralinguistic perspective A case in point is the

‘‘high/tall building but no high boy’’ example that some scholars haveused to show the arbitrariness of collocations (e.g., Lewis, 2002) Dirvenand Taylor (1988) did an excellent cognitive analysis of the usagepatterns of high and tall They demonstrate that, although bothadjectives can express ‘‘vertical extent’’ measuring from the base of anentity (often the ground or floor), for example, high and tall building ormountain, only high can express ‘‘positional high,’’ a concept that doesnot entail measuring from the ground but only in ‘‘reference to ground

or floor level’’ as in the cases of high ceiling and high clouds (p 380) Theyalso show that tall is often used to describe living things such as peopleand plants, whereas high is not Tsui’s (2004) interesting corpus studyreveals that tall is used almost exclusively to modify concrete things andits overall frequency is low; in contrast, high boasts a much higherfrequency and wider semantic range, because it can be used to describemany abstract concepts such as intensity, amount, and quality Also,although high is sometimes also used to modify concrete nouns, thepercentage is very low with a ratio of approximately 30% concrete versus70% abstract One weakness of Tsui’s (2004) study is that it did notexplore the causes for the usage and semantic differences, a problemfound in most corpus-based studies on collocations Specifically, she didnot explore why high is used mostly as a modifier of abstract nouns whiletall is mostly used to describe concrete nouns A cognitive analysis similar

to Dirven and Taylor’s could have provided the answer

Based on Dirven and Taylor’s (1988) study and also according to theOxford English Dictionary (OED; 2008), the key meaning of tall deals with

the height of people or things, especially living things, measured fromthe ground up; in contrast, high, while also having this meaning, mayrefer to a positional high space not measured from ground up Thisnon–ground-based meaning of high may account for the extensiveabstract and figurative use of the adjective because things that are said to

be high in the abstract sense (e.g., high spirit and high motivation) do nothave any true base (ground) from which to measure their height Thesemantic and usage differences also help explain why one can say ‘‘high/tall building’’ but only ‘‘tall boy.’’ In fact, because of its aforementionedcore meaning and usage, high is seldom used as a modifier of building,according to my corpus examination

PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY AND THE DEFINITION OF ARBITRARY ADOPTED

The new research findings about the use of high/tall raise seriousquestions about the arbitrariness of most collocations and the waycollocations should be taught It is the purpose of this study to examinewhat typical types of collocations are included in current collocationdictionaries and textbooks, whether they are mostly arbitrary based onclose corpus-based cognitive analyses, and how collocations are actuallytaught Based on the research findings of the study, appropriatepedagogical suggestions are proposed Because there are differentinterpretations or perspectives on the meaning of arbitrary as shownearlier, spelling out the definition adopted for this study is first in order.The meaning of arbitrary used in this study is limited to theaforementioned intralinguistic one; that is, it means semantically unmoti-vated It excludes the cross-linguistic meaning, because although it iscertainly valid to use contrastive analysis to draw L2 learners’ and teachers’attention to the unique features of collocations, it does not seem valid touse cross-linguistic differences as evidence or reason for viewingcollocations as arbitrary lexical units Such a conclusion overlooks twoimportant facts The first is that often a lexical item ‘‘does not have asingle, fixed meaning but rather an array of senses related in principledways to its prototypical value’’ (Langacker, 2008, p 72) So a lexical item in

a collocation that may appear strange based on its core or prototypicalmeaning may be entirely sensible when viewed in one of its related senses,

a point I return to later with examples The second fact is that a vocabularyitem may be semantically gridded differently in different languages; that

is, its semantic mapping may vary from language to language Thus thecollocations in the target language that appear arbitrary from theperspective of a learner’s L1 can be completely sensible, based on thesemantic grids or networks of its lexical items in the target language

It is a well known fact that, whereas a word may often have the samecore or prototypical meaning in two different languages, its extended orperipheral meanings can differ substantially For example, although theword run has the same core meaning of fast motion in both English andChinese, it boasts a much more extended semantic mapping in Englishthan in Chinese The word has, among others, the following extendedmeanings in English that are absent in Chinese: (1) to function, forexample, ‘‘The program or computer runs perfectly’’; ( 2) to manage,for example, ‘‘run a company’’; (3) to campaign, for example, ‘‘run forpresident.’’ The opposite is true, however, with the semantic mappings

of the word open in Chinese and English Its semantic mapping is muchbroader in Chinese than in English In Chinese, open can express, amongothers, the following meanings that are not found in English: (1) to turnsomething from an off status to an on (operating) status, for example,

‘‘open a light or computer’’; (2) to operate equipment, for example,

‘‘open a machine’’ (not in the sense of taking it apart); (3) to conduct orrun, or example, ‘‘open a meeting or lecture’’ (not in the sense ofbeginning a meeting or lecture, a use that is also found in English).Thus, if the collocation patterns of a word based on its semanticmapping in a given language are examined, it is often found that suchpatterns are sensible, that is, not arbitrary or at least not entirely Onemore reason, a very important one, for employing this intralinguisticperspective to examine whether a collocation is arbitrary is that it mayhelp language learners and teachers understand its semantic motiva-tions, which in turn can help them better grasp it It is very important tonote, however, that, in arguing for using intralinguistic semantic analysis

to understand and determine collocations’ motivations, I do not meanthat it is not valid to use contrastive analysis to help learners notice cross-linguistic differences in collocation patterns Such analysis is valid, but it

is not enough Students need to know and will benefit from knowing whythe words in L2 collocations collocate the way they do

DATA SELECTION

Selection of Collocation Dictionaries and Textbooks

The materials examined in this study are all the collocation dictionariesand textbooks currently available: Benson, Benson, and Ilson’s (1997) BBIDictionary of English Word Combinations, Crowther, Dignen, and Lea’s(2002) Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English, and Hill andLewis’ (2002) LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations, and McCarthy andO’Dell’s (2005; O’Dell and McCarthy, 2008) collocation textbook series.The reason for including only two textbooks (the two in McCarthy andO’Dell’s series) is that they are the only existing collocation textbooks—

very popular ones, though—produced by one of the most prestigiouspublishers in language teaching and written by renowned authors Thesefour publications (with the two textbooks in McCarthy & O’Dell’s seriesconsidered as one) are examined to see not only what types of collocationsthey include but also how they present collocations for teaching andlearning, information that helps researchers understand how collocationsare actually taught Research articles and Web sites offering collocationlearning activities are also examined for how they present collocations forteaching and learning.

Selection of Collocation Items for Examination

Because of space limitations, it is not possible to scrutinize all thecollocation items in all four publications but a review shows that most ofthem are not arbitrary Thus, selecting some examples is necessary Thecollocations in the noun entries of ability, work, and trip are chosen foranalysis for the following reasons First, although the collocation items inthese publications are primarily noun and verb based, noun entriesappear to be much more predominant, outnumbering the verb entries,especially in the LTP and the Oxford Collocation Dictionaries In fact, theOxford Collocations Dictionary does not have entries for any of the commonverbs, such as do, have, make, and take Second, ability and work areselected because ability is the first and work is the last noun entry found inall three dictionaries (they are also in McCarthy & O’Dell’s textbookseries but not the first or last noun entries in it) In other words, theywere not selected arbitrarily but for their representativeness (i.e.,included in all four publications) The reason for selecting the collocates

of trip is as follows: Like the other two nouns, trip is an entry found in allfour publications; more importantly, as is shown in the analysis, unlikeability and work, it has a few seemingly arbitrary collocations—make/take/have a trip—and, furthermore, the verbs in these seemingly arbitrarycollocations are some of the most frequently used collocation-makingverbs In this sense, they have special representative value for the issue ofarbitrariness being examined

These seemingly arbitrary collocations (i.e., make/take/have a tripcollocations) and powerful car/strong tea are then used for corpus-basedcognitive analysis to determine their arbitrariness The reason forincluding make/take/have a trip for such a close analysis is fourfold First,verb–noun collocations are one of the most common type ofcollocations and the focus of most studies on the teaching ofcollocations (Bahns & Eldaw, 1993; Chan & Liou, 2005; Nesselhauf,2003) Second, make/take/have a trip is one of the few verb–nouncollocations where multiple verbs appear to be used interchangeably; it

is very interesting to know whether the verbs are indeed interchangeable

in meaning, that is, whether the choice of them is unmotivated Third, asalready mentioned, make, take and have are three of the most frequentlyused verbs in English, especially as delexicalized verbs that formnumerous verb–noun collocations Fourth, it is assumed that verb–noun collocations formed with delexicalized verbs ‘‘tend to besemantically unmotivated’’ (Chan & Liou, 2005, pp 235–236); it is veryimportant to test this assumption in the case of make/take a trip Thereason for including powerful car/strong tea is twofold: (1) they areadjective–noun collocations, and (2), more importantly, they have beenrepeatedly used, even fairly recently, as examples to show the arbitrarynature of collocations (e.g., Hunston, 2002, p 68; Smadja & McKeown,

1991, p 230) Testing their arbitrariness is thus especially meaningful Inthe analysis of these classic examples, I also briefly examine one otherpair of arbitrary collocations: strong wind versus heavy rain

Corpora Used

The main corpus used for the study is the 360- million-word Corpus ofContemporary American English (COCA) developed by Mark Davies(2008) of Brigham Young University (the corpus has grown to 400million words since the completion of my data analysis with the 2008 and

2009 data added) It is chosen for its free online access; its large size,with comprehensive and representative data covering spoken English,fiction, magazine and newspaper articles, and academic writing (no L2data, though); the contemporariness in its data (1990–2008); and itspowerful, multifunction, and user-friendly search engine The WorldWide Web and the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC; amega corpus with a data structure very similar to that of the COCA) havealso been used in a few instances to make sure the findings from theCOCA data are not merely idiosyncratic usages of American English(when or how they are used are explained in the data analysis section).DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

Verb Collocations With Ability/Work/Trip Listed in the Four Publications

First, I compiled all the verb collocates of each of the three nounslisted in the four publications, and the results are reported in Table 1.For each noun, a few of the verbs appeared in all four publications butmost in only one, with some appearing in two or three An examination

of the collocates suggests that, in the case of the collocates of ability and

work, none appears actually arbitrary The collocates of ability all fallneatly into a few very sensible semantic groups, for example, withdemonstrate, display, exhibit, and show all expressing the meaning ofshowing ability, whereas assess, measure, overrate, and underrate convey themeaning of measuring ability Similarly, the collocates of work also fallinto sensible semantic groups The only items that may appear arbitraryare those phrasal verbs like carry out, but this is a different issue because,

if a person understands that one of the meanings of carry out is doing orperforming, then its collocation with work is perfectly sensible In thecase of the collocates of trip, most of them do not sound arbitrary either(e.g., arrange, cancel, extend, plan, organize, and postpone a trip), but thereare a few (have, make, and take a trip) that may be considered somewhatarbitrary, especially from a cross-linguistic perspective To determinewhether they are truly semantically unmotivated, however, calls for aclose corpus-based cognitive analysis, which is done later The mostimportant evidence that most of the verb collocates of the three nounsare not arbitrary is not the finding that they all fall into sensible semanticgroups, however, but the fact that the collocates of a noun in a givensemantic group are largely interchangeable with no or little change inmeaning, as shown in the case of the showing ability group: Any one ofthe verbs demonstrate, display, exhibit, or show conveys basically the samemeaning when collocated with ability This fact suggests that they are notarbitrary collocations, because one of the main arguments about thearbitrariness of collocations (e.g., Lewis, 2002; Nesselhauf, 2003) is that a

TABLE 1.

Distribution of the Verb Collocates of Ability/Work/Trip in the Four Publications

Number of the publications they appeared in

Acquire, assess, display, encourage, exhibit, foster, lack,

lose, measure, nurse, overrate, stifle, underrate, use

1

Begin, find, finish, get, get to, seek, take on, undo 2

Arrive at, be engaged in, be off, commence, continue,

create, embark on, get down to, go about, halt, leave,

look for, make, need, neglect, oversee, produce, quit,

set about/to, start, supervise, take off from, undo

1

Be back from, be on, book, come back from, cut short,

embark on, extent, postpone

1

(true) collocation does not allow its collocate(s) to vary freely, at leastnot so extensively.

Take a Trip Versus Make a Trip Versus Have a Trip Versus Do a Trip

To search for all the tokens of the verb + trip structure in the COCA, Ientered for query ‘‘[v*] a trip’’ and ‘‘[v*] a * trip.’’ The search yielded

598 tokens of take a or an (adjective) trip (including all the tense oraspect forms of the verb; of the 598 tokens, 199 contained an adjective,e.g., take a fishing trip); 331 tokens of make a or an (adjective) trip (with

189 containing an adjective); 151 tokens of have a or an (adjective) tripwith 141 containing an adjective; and 13 tokens of do a or an (adjective)trip with 10 containing an adjective The results indicate that take a tripand make a trip constitute the typical collocations for expressing the idea

of to go on a trip However, have a trip also has a substantial number oftokens, and it is included in two of the four publications, but a close look

at its token suggests that it has a uniquely different meaning It has a verylow frequency when used without an adjective but boasts a fairly highfrequency when used with an adjective A close reading of its tokensindicates that 77 of the total 141 (a little over one-half) were used as anexpression of good wishes for a safe or good trip (e.g., have a wonderfultrip) In other words, have here means to experience or enjoy, a meaning that

is found in its semantic mapping based on the OED In fact, the majority(86%) of the have a trip tokens are used to convey this meaning Thus, ingeneral, the meaning of have a trip differs from that of take/make a trip.Before I discuss do a trip, the collocation with the lowest frequency inthe set, let me examine the use of take a trip and make a trip Are the twocollocations really synonymous? A close reading of the tokens inconcordance lines suggests that the answer is no Whereas take a trip isused often for a trip of leisure, make a trip is typically used for a businesstrip or a trip that appears particularly purposeful and effortful from thespeaker’s point of view The following examples from the COCA helpillustrate the point

Examples of take a trip

1 she took a trip to England in 1877 for a much needed rest

2 On one day, we took a trip to Rainbow Bridge National Monument, thelargest natural bridge in the world

3 Two judges from Louisiana recently took a trip to Hong Kong and Bangkokand charged it off to the taxpayers of Louisiana

Examples of make a trip

4 You’ll probably have to make a trip to the assessor’s office to get this muchdetail

5 President Bush made a trip to Capitol Hill to meet with Senate Republicansand try to change some minds.

6 This past fall when three of however [sic] U.S Congressman made a trip toIraq they caught a lot of flak for it

The difference between the two collocations can also be seen in theirtokens with an adjective Of the 199 tokens of take a or an (adjective) trip,the most frequent token was take a field trip (to a museum, show, etc.),with 25 tokens (one eighth of the total number of tokens) Furthermore,the adjectives used in many of the remaining tokens were leisure-related,such as boat, train, holiday, sightseeing, and fishing In contrast, none of the

189 tokens of make a or an (adjective) trip contains a leisure-relatedadjective, and the token with the highest frequency in this group is make

a special trip, with 25 occurrences (more than one eighth of the total) Bythe meaning of the word special, a special trip must be one made withsome unusual purpose or effort A quick check of the BNC shows similarpatterns in British English: The most common adjectives for take a * tripare day and boat, whereas the most common one for make a * trip is specialand for have a * trip is nice

Based on this semantic difference between take a trip and make a trip,one can say that the verb choice in each collocation is not arbitrary but ismotivated by its core meaning Certainly, neither verb here is used in itscore sense; instead, they are both used in the sense of to accomplish/perform (OED), one of the extended meanings found in the semanticmapping of each verb Yet, shaped by its core meaning, each verb in itscollocation conveys a distinct meaning of its own It is known that thecore meaning of make is to create, a process that is more purposeful and/

or effortful than that of grip, the core meaning of take This difference inmeaning between the two verbs in fact also appears in many othercollocations made up of the two verbs It is salient in pairs such as makeversus take a phone call, make versus take an offer or deal, make versus take anissue In each pair, the make collocation suggests an action involvingmore planning, effort, and/or initiation One can also find the samedifference when comparing most of the other make + noun collocationswith most of the other take + noun collocations: make a or an decision/effort/argument/plan versus take a break/vacation/walk/your time

Now I discuss do a trip, a collocation in the set that is not listed in any

of the four collocation publications, perhaps because of its very lowfrequency It may have been considered as an idiosyncratic expressionused only by some individuals, but a scrutiny of its tokens seems tosuggest that do a trip often conveys a unique meaning—the meaning ofcomplete a trip, especially in the sense of completing a trip as anachievement, as can be seen in the following COCA examples and asevidenced by the fact that 8 of its total 13 tokens are in the past tense: