Siepman - Collocation Colligation and Encoding Dic

COLLOCATION, COLLIGATION AND
ENCODING DICTIONARIES. PART I:
LEXICOLOGICAL ASPECTS
Dirk Siepmann: Universita« t-GH Siegen, Fachbereich 3, Adolf-Reichwein-Strae,
D-57068 Siegen,Germany ([e-mail])
Abstrac t
This article attempts to synthesise recent advances in collocational theory into a
coherent framework for lexicological theory and lexicographic practice. By posing a
number of fundamental questions related to the definition of collocation, it critically
reviews frequency-based, semantic and pragmatic approaches to collocation. It is found,
among other things, that two types of collocation, namely ‘long-distance’ collocation
and collocation between semantic features, have suffered almost total neglect. This leads
to suggestions for a new division of the collocational spectrum and for a revised
definition of ‘collocation’ based on the notions of ‘usage norm’ (Steyer 2000) and
‘holisticity’ (Siepmann 2003). It is argued that this new view of collocation considerably
widens the dictionary maker’s brief, since future lexicography will have to provide a full
account of both structurally simple and structurally complex units, including fixed
expressions of regular syntactic-semantic composition (see Part II of this article, to be
published in the March issue of this journal).
1. I n tr o du c t io n
According to modern science, there is no such thing as ‘independent existence’;
at least since the advent of chaos theory, there has been full recognition that
all forms of life and material phenomena, whether at the micro-level or at the
macro-level, are interdependent. In linguistics, this realization has found its
fittest expression in the idea of linguistic rather than literary ‘intertextuality’,
whereby the meaning of one text and its constituent elements depends on
millions of other texts using similar or identical elements. Textual meaning is
thus created by the interplay of two types of repetition, viz. (a) collocation
(in the largest possible sense, including colligation
1
and phraseology) and
(b) cohesion. It turns out that one instance of collocation and the entire
language are mutually illuminating, since the instance is understood in terms of
International Journal of Lexicography, Vol. 18 No. 4
ß2005 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions,
please email: [email protected]
doi:10.1093/ijl/eci042

the whole, and the whole in terms of the instance (cf. Hunston 2001: 31); taking
this a bit further, we might say that not only is each pattern necessary for
comprehending the sum total of similar patterns, but each pattern is
also a miniature version of that sum total, as shown by the fact that the
meaning of individual patterns (e.g. German ‘sonniges Gemu
¨t’ [‘sunny
disposition’ ¼irrepressible high spirits] vs ‘sonnige Lage’ [sunny location]),
even if shorn of any context, is evident to the native speaker.
This relatively recent view of meaning creation (Hoey 1991, 1998, 2000,
Feilke 1994, 1996) seems much more in keeping with speakers’ intuitive
knowledge about language than was the case in earlier structuralist theories.
The latter tended to assume that expressions such as ‘sonnige Lage’ have
both a compositional, literal meaning and a non-compositional, figurative
meaning (Feilke 1996: 128). In an intertextual or socially-based view of
meaning creation, the compositional meaning is exposed for what it is, namely
an abstraction of the linguist which has no base in the native speaker’s
mental lexicon; the expression ‘sonnige Lage’ is then considered to be a
‘holistic’ sign that is irreducible to the sum of its parts. In a related
development, computational and cognitive linguists have used corpus-linguistic
insights to work out models of language grounded in actual usage rather
than abstract general rules (Chandler 1993, Croft and Cruse 2003, Skousen
1989). In these models word or clause formation is by analogy with existing
exemplars, and it will be seen that such models can also be applied to
collocation.
This article reviews, one by one, the various defining criteria that have in
the last half century been called upon to define the notion of collocation,
pursuing a dual objective: (a) to show that none of these criteria apply in
all cases, so that we can at best give a prototypical definition of collocation,
and (b) to demonstrate that the problems associated with the definition
of collocation stem from the mechanistic, old-paradigm view of language
embodied in structuralist theories which try to impose theoretical abstractions
on an infinitely complex reality arising from communicative interaction and
the institutional practices such interaction puts in place. This will then allow
us to provide a more secure and more broadly based underpinning for the
treatment of colligation and collocation in lexicography. With the exception
of Steyer (2000), no such model has as yet been proposed.
The subject of collocation has been approached from two main angles:
on one side are the semantically-based approaches (e.g. Benson 1986, Mel’c
ˇuk
1998, Gonza
´lez-Rey 2002, Hausmann 2003, Grossmann and Tutin 2003) which
assume a particular meaning relationship between the constituents of a
collocation; on the other is the frequency-oriented approach (e.g. Jones and
Sinclair 1974, Sinclair 1991, Sinclair 2004, Kjellmer 1994) which looks at
statistically significant cooccurrences of two or more words. This theoretical
distinction is paralleled by a geographical divide: the semantic approach has its
410 Dirk Siepmann

origins in continental European research into phraseology, while the frequency
approach is firmly rooted in British contextualism. There has until now been
surprisingly little exchange between the two groups, and when the semanticist
Hausmann (2003) claims to have won the war over collocation, one wonders if
that war has ever been fought.
A third, more recent approach to phrasemes and collocations (Feilke 1996,
2003) might be termed ‘pragmatic’, since it claims that the structural
irregularities and non-compositionality underlying such expressions are
diachronically and functionally subordinate to pragmatic regularities deter-
mining the relationship between the situational context and linguistic forms.
In this view, collocation can best be explained via recourse to contextualisation
theory (Fillmore 1976).
In what follows, I shall argue that there is no reason to resort to the military
metaphor, let alone go to war on matters of collocation. It is much wiser to
unify the three approaches. Tersely stated, I shall argue the following theses:
(1) Only the frequency-based approach can provide a heuristic for discovering
the entire class of co-occurrences; in a way, it is safe from refutation, but
empty – it gives us all the raw material, but tells us nothing about how this
material came to be or how it is to be structured; it has also resulted in
lexicographic products of doubtful value, such as Kjellmer (1994) and
Sinclair (1995) (cf. Hausmann 2003: 319–320, Siepmann 1998).
(2) By contrast, the semantically-based approach is fragmentary – it cannot
account for all possible cases. It would nevertheless seem absurd to
abandon such an intuitively appealing approach at the first appearance of a
counterexample, since it has given rise to reliable collocational dictionaries
such as Langenscheidts Kontextwo
¨rterbuch Franzo ¨sisch-Deutsch.
(3) Likewise, as I shall explain below, a purely pragmatic approach relying on
the extralinguistic context cannot explain a large number of co-occurrences
operating at the level of semantic features.
(4) It follows from this that the debate between the various approaches is a
more/less rather than a yes/no issue. What is needed is an extension of the
semantically-based approach that will take account of strings of regular
syntactic composition which form a sense unit with a relatively stable
meaning. ‘Lexical bundles’ (Biber et al. 1999) such as je sais que c’est or it’s
been will not be included among the class of collocations (cf. Siepmann
2003). Although such sequences may perform similar or identical functions
across a range of texts, they have no meaning ‘by themselves’. In sharp
contrast, there are good theoretical and practical reasons for subsuming
under the notion of collocation such colligational patterns as regarde ou
`tu
vas, dans les colonnes de (þname of newspaper or magazine) or si elle est
prise a
`temps (referring to an illness), which have so far been regarded as
free sequences of words subject only to general rules of syntax and semantics.
Collocation, Colligation and Encoding Dictionaries 411

For greater expository convenience, the various questions raised by the
discussion of the above theses will be broken down under five separate heads:
(1) How many elements make a collocation?
(2) What elements make a collocation?
(3) Are collocations arbitrary?
(4) Can we distinguish between collocations and phraseology on the one hand,
and collocations and free combinations on the other?
(5) Are collocations monosemous and monoreferential? Are there synonymic
collocations?
This will lead to a division of the collocational spectrum into four major
categories, all of which have their role to play in the making of dictionaries,
especially those aimed at the non-native speaker.
My theoretical arguments will be leavened with a large number of concrete
examples encountered during the ongoing compilation of three unabridged
bilingual thesauri intended mainly for non-native speakers of English, French
and German (the ‘Bilexicon’ project). All of these examples have been drawn
from the following authentic sources (for a detailed account of corpus
construction, see Siepmann 2005):
(a) electronic editions of wide-circulation quality newspapers and news
magazines (The Times, The Guardian, The Economist, Le Monde,
Le Monde Diplomatique, Su
¨ddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau,
Der Spiegel );
(b) a large corpus of academic texts produced from reviews, journal articles,
doctoral theses and portions of books;
(c) 50-million-word corpora of fiction and fan fiction freely available on
the Internet;
(d) a 100-million word corpus of the language of motoring based mainly on
Internet sources.
Table 1 gives a breakdown of the sources used by corpus type, content, size,
baseline year and analysis software.
2. How many elements make a collocation?
It is accepted wisdom among European researchers that collocations are
binary units, and this is probably true for the majority of the class. Thus, the
most common type of collocation is the combination of a noun with a verb,
and there are hundreds of thousands of examples which confirm this point
of view (e.g. take a step,launch an appeal ). Mel’c
ˇuk (most recently 2003)
argues that the constituents of such collocations tend to be linked by a
standard lexical function, such as Magn (rely on [Magn] ¼heavily, beautiful
412 Dirk Siepmann

Table 1: Corpora used in this study
Corpus (Abbreviation) Type Content Word Count Baseline Year
Corpus of Academic
English (CAE)
full-text reviews, journal articles, doctoral
theses and portions of books
30 million 1980 (less than 5% of texts
predate 1980)
Corpus of Academic
French (CAF)
full-text reviews, journal articles, doctoral
theses and portions of books
30 million 1980 (less than 5% of texts
predate 1980)
Corpus of Academic
German (CAG)
full-text reviews, journal articles, doctoral
theses and portions of books
30 million 1980 (less than 5% of texts
predate 1980)
Corpus of English
Fiction (FE)
full-text and samples reviews, journal articles and
portions of books from CAE
50 million 1980
Corpus of French
Fiction (FF)
full-text and samples reviews, journal articles and
portions of books from CAF
50 million 1980
Corpus of German
Fiction (FG)
full-text and samples reviews, journal articles and
portions of books from CAG
50 million 1980
Corpus of English
Motoring (CME)
full-text and samples Internet forums and chatrooms,
electronic magazines, transport
sites, encyclopaedia and
dictionary articles
100 million 1995
British Newspapers and
News Magazines (NE)
full-text Issues of The Times, The
Guardian and The Economist,
published in London
100 million 1990
(Continued)
Collocation, Colligation and Encoding Dictionaries 413