Common English collocations and their usage What is collocation?

Types of collocations

Grammatical collocation
Lexical collocation
Open collocation
Restricted collocation
Bound collocation

Grammatical collocation

• Benson, M. (1986) defines grammatical collocation as “a dominant word (verb, noun, adjective) followed by a grammatical word, typically a preposition”.

Types of Grammatical collocations

• 1- Verb-preposition combination
• Verb + Preposition : ex

depend on (NOT depend of), look after, struggle for.

2- noun-preposition combination

noun + preposition : ex

access to , administration for

• 3- adjective-preposition combination
• Ex : afraid of, absent from, accountable to (with), answerable for.
• 4- Verb-participle combination (phrase verbs). Some verbs need to be followed by specific adverbial particles. These are called “phrasal verbs” whose meaning is different from the meaning of the separate constituents of the verb and the particle

• in transitive phrase verbs, the particle (adverb) can generally occur before and after the direct object.
• Did you make up this story?

Did you make this story up?

• How do you account for this phenomenon’s?
• How do you account this phenomenon for?

Lexical collocations

Lexical collocations contain no subordinate element; they usually consist of two equal lexical components.

Types of lexical collocations

1-Noun-verb combinations

• Snow was falling as our plane took off.
• The bomb went off when he started the car engine.

• 2- adjective-noun combinations
• The doctor ordered him to take regular exercise.
• The Titanic sank on its maiden voyage.

• Verb-noun combination