Common English collocations and their usage What is collocation?

Adverb-adjective combination

• These are used to emphasize purpose, or when we intend to add a strong feeling or a special kind of behavior to adjectives.
• Invading that country was an utterly stupid thing to do.
• We entered a richly decorated room.
• Are you fully aware of the implications of your action?

3- open collocation

• Cowie (1983) characterizes these as combination in which “both elements (verb and object or adjective and noun) are freely recombirable … Typically, also, in open collocations, each element s used in a common literal sense”

Examples

• A- They hurt her badly. (physical or material) VS
• B- They hurt her terribly. (sentiments, feelings)

4- restricted collocations

• Aisenstadt (1979) defines these as “combinations of two or more words used in one of their regular, non-idiomatic meanings, following certain structural patterns, and restricted in their commutability not only by grammatical and semantic valence, but also by usage”

This type of collocation occurs in various types of syntactic configuration.

• 1- subject/Verb
• Ex: birds chirp (fly\sing)
• 2- verb/object
• Ex: compile a dictionary , reject an appeal
• 3- Adjective/noun
• Ex: grave concern , sincere condlences

Bound collocations

• Cowie (1981) defines it as “a bridge category between collocations and idioms “exhibits unique contextual determination.
• Examples :
• . foot the bill. (to pay for something)
• . curry favour . (‘to ingratiate yourself with someone)
• This kind of collocation is relatively uncommon in English.

Culture-bound collocations

• Some collocations reflect the cultural setting in which they occur. If the cultural setting of the source and target languages are significantly different, there will be instances when the source text will contain collocations which convey what to the target reader would be unfamiliar associations of ideas. Such culture-specific collocations express ideas previously unexpressed in the target language. Like culture-specific words, they point to concepts which are not easily accessible to the target reader.