dissertation collocation

Transform Your Academic English Skills With These 50 Collocations

Academic writing can be one of the hardest things to perfect in English. This advanced skill requires perfect grammar, pin-point vocabulary usage and a deep understanding of the subject you are writing about. What it also requires is a very specific register (level of formality) which can be difficult to get right for non-native English speakers (and quite a few native speakers as well!).

One way you can improve and transform your academic English writing is by learning some useful collocations which will make you sound self-assured, knowledgeable and bring just the right level of formality to your dissertation or thesis.

This guide will give you 50 of the most useful academic collocations as well as definitions and some examples taken from genuine academic papers.

Study tip: Practice writing out your own sentences using each of the collocations listed here. Does the structure make sense grammatically? Do you understand the concept? Check your sentence against the example sentence for each collocation.

1. Accurate assessment -   correct and precise evaluation of something or someone

E.g. “ Accurate assessment of head motion can be a useful tool in clinical studies”.

2. Address the issue - consider or deal with the matter at hand

E.g. “To help address this issue , we have extended our previous study and examined in detail the…”.

3. Adversely affect - change in a negative way

E.g. “A literature search was performed to determine whether non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) adversely affect the healing of stress fractures”.

4. Become apparent - to be suddenly clear or obvious

E.g. “They become apparent , however, when a new molecular species is introduced into the atmosphere...”.

5. Brief overview - a non-detailed look at the subject as a whole

E.g. “This paper offers a brief but broad overview of the field of individual of language learning”.

6. Broad range - of extensive scope

E.g. “The colour produced from this reaction is stable and increases in a proportional fashion over a broad range of increasing protein concentrations”.

7. Causal link - one thing being responsible for another

E.g. “A causal link between high need for achievement and small business ownership is not found”.

8. Characteristic feature - a feature which distinguishes or defines something or someone

E.g. “The characteristic feature of the book is the effort to explain the mathematical origins of the most widely used statistical formulas in terms that persons with comparatively little mathematical training can easily follow”.

9. Deeply rooted - firmly implanted or established

E.g. “This book describes efforts to develop an approach to teaching and teacher education that is deeply rooted in the study of practice”.

10. Detailed analysis - an in-depth study

E.g. “The major difference between my book and others at this level is its coverage of the detailed analysis of experiments”.

11. Essential component - a vital part of something

E.g. “We show here that these proteins are an essential component of the cell surface receptor”.

12. Establish a relationship - to prove or show a link between two things

E.g. “Our aim was to establish the relationship between aortic stiffness and stroke death in hypertensive patients”.

13. Existing research - previous academic work on the same subject

E.g. “This working paper reviews the existing research evidence about the additional costs or deprivation that disabled people face”.

14. First impression - initial thought on a subject, prior to any detailed analysis

E.g. “Our first impression was strengthened by the fact that we were aware a condition existed in Povoa de Varzim”.

15. Frequently cited - often quoted or referred to in reference to something

E.g. “It should be recognized that other systems are frequently cited , particularly in engineering literature”.

16. Fundamental principle - principle from which other principles can be derived

E.g. “The authors argue for the restoration of beneficence to its place as the fundamental principle of medical ethics”.

17. General consensus - the majority opinion on a topic

E.g. “There is a general consensus that forward exchange rates have little, if any power as forecasts of future spot exchange rates”.

18. Gain insight - achieve a more profound understanding

E.g. “Through this comparison we hope to gain insight into the way they perform specific tasks”.

19. Hierarchical structure - a system where elements are subordinate to other elements

E.g. “After reviewing their theoretical approach, the authors present four kinds of hierarchical structure in music”.

20. Highly controversial - tending to provoke fierce disagreement

E.g. “A highly controversial issue in financial economies is whether stocks overreact”.

21. Immediately apparent - obvious and clear at that moment

E.g. “The reasons for this are not immediately apparent and deserve further investigation”.

22. Increase the likelihood - to make more likely or plausible

E.g. “Numerous high school students engage in behaviours that increase their likelihood of death from these four causes”.

23. Key element - a main or fundamental component

E.g. “Provisional restorations represent a key element in the realization of extensive esthetic rehabilitations”.

24. Largely confined - focussed in a particular area

E.g. “The metabolic syndrome is largely confined to overweight and obese adults”.

25. Literal interpretation - a non-metaphorical or figurative reading

E.g. “In Experiment 2, targets were phrases that could be given either an idiomatic or a literal interpretation ”.

26. Major challenge - a large or fundamental problem

E.g. “Keeping up with the population increase is a major challenge for urban areas”.

27. Markedly different - noticeably distinct

E.g. “The spectrum of pyridine coordinately bonded to the surface is markedly different from that of the pyridinium ion”.

28. Negative connotation - suggesting something bad or wrong

E.g. “The label placebo was avoided because of its negative connotation” .

29. Newly emerging - novel or original concept first being introduced

E.g. “This is a book about a newly emerging area of research in instructional technology”.

30. Offer insight - present a deep or original analysis

E.g. “This study reveals what those practices are and may offer insight for how

they fit into future workplaces”.

31. Organisational structure - the way groups are arranged

E.g. “This paper models the inner workings of relationship lending, the implications for bank organisational structure , and the effects of shocks to the economic environment on the availability of relationship credit to small businesses”.

32. Particular emphasis - stressing one aspect of something

E.g. “The first chapter, a review of some of the principal social surveys carried out in the last half-century or so, with particular emphasis on British experience, has been entirely rewritten”.

33. Perceived importance - the opinion that something is particularly important or relevant

E.g. “We examined whether employees' perceived importance of the training program would be one variable that mediates the relationship between training assignment and training motivation”.

34. Pioneering work - work which explores previously uncharted territory

E.g. “Hans-Paul Schwefel has responded to rapidly growing interest in Evolutionary Computation, a field that originated, in part, with his pioneering work in the early 1970s”.

35. Positive feature - something good

E.g. “The great chemical diversity is a positive feature in that it indicates the likelihood that a variety of approaches can be made to prevention”.

36. Qualitatively different - differences relating to quality as opposed to quantity

E.g. “Current methods for generating qualitatively different plans are either based on simple randomisation of planning decisions”.

37. Quantitative study - a study which focuses on aspects of quantity

E.g. “Qualitative and quantitative studies were performed on pulmonary blood vessels in lung tissue obtained by biopsy, pneumonectomy, or autopsy”.

38. Raise a question - necessitates an obvious enquiry

E.g. “At the same time, it also raises the question of whether a single reform can meet the very different objectives of different supporters”.

39. Rapid expansion - t o grow larger at a fast rate

E.g. “It has been suggested that the rapid expansion could be the result of human activities causing habitat disturbances or stresses such as pollution”.

40. Reach a consensus - develop a general agreement

E.g. “A consensus conference was organized to evaluate the data and reach a consensus on optimal treatment protocols”.

41. Reciprocal relationship - benefiting both parties equally

E.g. “ The aim of the present study is to examine the reciprocal relationship between parental attachment and adolescent internalising and externalising problem behaviour”.

42. Seem plausible - appear possible or likely

E.g. “Again, even though the results seem plausible , they are hard to interpret in the absence of a theory”.

43. Specific examples - focussed examples

E.g. “The specific examples used are shown to have a substantial biasing effect on diagnostic accuracy”.

44. Theoretical approach - focussing on theories rather than practical application

E.g. “A new theoretical approach to language has emerged in the past 10–15 years that allows linguistic observations about form–meaning pairings, known as 'constructions', to be stated directly”.

45. Typical example - an example which is common or expected in its outcome

E.g. “A typical example would be the design of a trial to evaluate the benefits of specialist stroke units”.

46. Underlying assumption - a belief which dictates other beliefs

E.g. “Much of ecological theory is based on the underlying assumption of equilibrium population dynamics”.

47. Universally accepted - an assumption which is not commonly disputed

E.g. “The idea of a biological root to human nature was almost universally accepted at the turn of the century”.

48. Vary considerably - to be widely different in form or features

E.g. “The results of these procedures vary considerably among patients”.

49. Vast majority - an overwhelming amount

E.g. “The vast majority of cases occur in developing countries, mainly because of lack of screening”.

50. Well-documented - evidence from numerous or reliable sources

E.g. “Although CNS depression and analgesia are well documented effects of the cannabinoids, the mechanisms responsible for these and other cannabinoid-induced effects are so far known”.

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• Academic vocab

The Academic Collocation List (ACL) Common academic collocations

This page describes the Academic Collocation List (ACL), explaining what it is and giving a full list of collocations in the ACL, sorted by headword . There is also, in another section, an ACL highlighter which can be used to highlight ACL words in a text, as well as an ACL mind map creator.

What is the ACL?

For another look at the same content, check out YouTube or Youku , or the infographic . There is a worksheet (with answers and teacher's notes) for this video.

The Academic Collocation List (ACL) is a list containing 2,469 of the most frequent and useful collocations which occur in written academic English. It can be seen as a collocational companion to the Academic Word List (AWL) , consisting of collocations (or word combinations) rather than single words.

The ACL was developed by Kirsten Ackermann and Yu-Hua Chen using the Pearson International Corpus of Academic English (PICAE), with advice from English teaching experts to ensure the collocations chosen would be useful to students of English. The ACL gives around 1.4% coverage of words in academic English (based on the source corpus used in the study). In contrast, the same collocations give only 0.1% coverage for a general corpus, showing they are indeed much more common in academic than general English.

Many of the words in the ACL are also contained in the AWL, e.g. alternative approach appears in the ACL, and both of these words appear in the AWL. However, there are many word combinations which are very common in academic writing which contain one word or no words from the AWL, such as generally agree (both of these words actually appear in the GSL ). Studying collocations is an important way to build up your academic vocabulary, and the Academic Collocation List is one possible tool to help you do this.

Check out the Quizzes section for exercises to practise using words in the ACL.

The Academic Collocation List

The 2,469 collocations in the ACL are listed below. The list has been adapted for this website by collecting collocations under headwords, in the same way that words in the AWL are categorised. In addition, the collocations have been listed under both of the headwords they contain in order to make them easier to find. This means, for example, that the collocation great accuracy appears both under the headword great and the headword accurate . The collocation accurate description likewise appears under accurate , as well as under the headword describe . This means each collocation appears twice in the list, once for each headword. Where words occur in the AWL , the AWL headword has been used, e.g. the AWL headword for academic is academy .

There are three versions of this list on the website:

• ordered by headword ( this page )
• listed according to collocation type ( adj + n etc.)
• listed by frequency

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Author: Sheldon Smith    ‖    Last modified: 28 November 2022.

Sheldon Smith is the founder and editor of EAPFoundation.com. He has been teaching English for Academic Purposes since 2004. Find out more about him in the about section and connect with him on Twitter , Facebook and LinkedIn .

The AWL highlighter allows you to highlight words from the AWL (Academic Word List) in any text you choose.

The Academic Word List (AWL) contains 570 word families which frequently appear in academic texts.

The Academic Collocation List (ACL) is a list containing 2,469 of the most frequent and useful collocations which occur in written academic English.

Academic vocabulary consists of general words, non-general academic words, and technical words.

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How To Write A Dissertation Or Thesis

8 straightforward steps to craft an a-grade dissertation.

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) Expert Reviewed By: Dr Eunice Rautenbach | June 2020

Writing a dissertation or thesis is not a simple task. It takes time, energy and a lot of will power to get you across the finish line. It’s not easy – but it doesn’t necessarily need to be a painful process. If you understand the big-picture process of how to write a dissertation or thesis, your research journey will be a lot smoother.  

In this post, I’m going to outline the big-picture process of how to write a high-quality dissertation or thesis, without losing your mind along the way. If you’re just starting your research, this post is perfect for you. Alternatively, if you’ve already submitted your proposal, this article which covers how to structure a dissertation might be more helpful.

How To Write A Dissertation: 8 Steps

• Clearly understand what a dissertation (or thesis) is
• Find a unique and valuable research topic
• Craft a convincing research proposal
• Write up a strong introduction chapter
• Review the existing literature and compile a literature review
• Design a rigorous research strategy and undertake your own research
• Present the findings of your research
• Draw a conclusion and discuss the implications

Step 1: Understand exactly what a dissertation is

This probably sounds like a no-brainer, but all too often, students come to us for help with their research and the underlying issue is that they don’t fully understand what a dissertation (or thesis) actually is.

So, what is a dissertation?

At its simplest, a dissertation or thesis is a formal piece of research , reflecting the standard research process . But what is the standard research process, you ask? The research process involves 4 key steps:

• Ask a very specific, well-articulated question (s) (your research topic)
• See what other researchers have said about it (if they’ve already answered it)
• If they haven’t answered it adequately, undertake your own data collection and analysis in a scientifically rigorous fashion
• Answer your original question(s), based on your analysis findings

In short, the research process is simply about asking and answering questions in a systematic fashion . This probably sounds pretty obvious, but people often think they’ve done “research”, when in fact what they have done is:

• Started with a vague, poorly articulated question
• Not taken the time to see what research has already been done regarding the question
• Collected data and opinions that support their gut and undertaken a flimsy analysis
• Drawn a shaky conclusion, based on that analysis

If you want to see the perfect example of this in action, look out for the next Facebook post where someone claims they’ve done “research”… All too often, people consider reading a few blog posts to constitute research. Its no surprise then that what they end up with is an opinion piece, not research. Okay, okay – I’ll climb off my soapbox now.

The key takeaway here is that a dissertation (or thesis) is a formal piece of research, reflecting the research process. It’s not an opinion piece , nor a place to push your agenda or try to convince someone of your position. Writing a good dissertation involves asking a question and taking a systematic, rigorous approach to answering it.

If you understand this and are comfortable leaving your opinions or preconceived ideas at the door, you’re already off to a good start!

Step 2: Find a unique, valuable research topic

As we saw, the first step of the research process is to ask a specific, well-articulated question. In other words, you need to find a research topic that asks a specific question or set of questions (these are called research questions ). Sounds easy enough, right? All you’ve got to do is identify a question or two and you’ve got a winning research topic. Well, not quite…

A good dissertation or thesis topic has a few important attributes. Specifically, a solid research topic should be:

Let’s take a closer look at these:

Attribute #1: Clear

Your research topic needs to be crystal clear about what you’re planning to research, what you want to know, and within what context. There shouldn’t be any ambiguity or vagueness about what you’ll research.

Here’s an example of a clearly articulated research topic:

An analysis of consumer-based factors influencing organisational trust in British low-cost online equity brokerage firms.

As you can see in the example, its crystal clear what will be analysed (factors impacting organisational trust), amongst who (consumers) and in what context (British low-cost equity brokerage firms, based online).

Need a helping hand?

Attribute #2:   Unique

Your research should be asking a question(s) that hasn’t been asked before, or that hasn’t been asked in a specific context (for example, in a specific country or industry).

For example, sticking organisational trust topic above, it’s quite likely that organisational trust factors in the UK have been investigated before, but the context (online low-cost equity brokerages) could make this research unique. Therefore, the context makes this research original.

One caveat when using context as the basis for originality – you need to have a good reason to suspect that your findings in this context might be different from the existing research – otherwise, there’s no reason to warrant researching it.

Attribute #3: Important

Simply asking a unique or original question is not enough – the question needs to create value. In other words, successfully answering your research questions should provide some value to the field of research or the industry. You can’t research something just to satisfy your curiosity. It needs to make some form of contribution either to research or industry.

For example, researching the factors influencing consumer trust would create value by enabling businesses to tailor their operations and marketing to leverage factors that promote trust. In other words, it would have a clear benefit to industry.

So, how do you go about finding a unique and valuable research topic? We explain that in detail in this video post – How To Find A Research Topic . Yeah, we’ve got you covered 😊

Step 3: Write a convincing research proposal

Once you’ve pinned down a high-quality research topic, the next step is to convince your university to let you research it. No matter how awesome you think your topic is, it still needs to get the rubber stamp before you can move forward with your research. The research proposal is the tool you’ll use for this job.

So, what’s in a research proposal?

The main “job” of a research proposal is to convince your university, advisor or committee that your research topic is worthy of approval. But convince them of what? Well, this varies from university to university, but generally, they want to see that:

• You have a clearly articulated, unique and important topic (this might sound familiar…)
• You’ve done some initial reading of the existing literature relevant to your topic (i.e. a literature review)
• You have a provisional plan in terms of how you will collect data and analyse it (i.e. a methodology)

At the proposal stage, it’s (generally) not expected that you’ve extensively reviewed the existing literature , but you will need to show that you’ve done enough reading to identify a clear gap for original (unique) research. Similarly, they generally don’t expect that you have a rock-solid research methodology mapped out, but you should have an idea of whether you’ll be undertaking qualitative or quantitative analysis , and how you’ll collect your data (we’ll discuss this in more detail later).

Long story short – don’t stress about having every detail of your research meticulously thought out at the proposal stage – this will develop as you progress through your research. However, you do need to show that you’ve “done your homework” and that your research is worthy of approval .

So, how do you go about crafting a high-quality, convincing proposal? We cover that in detail in this video post – How To Write A Top-Class Research Proposal . We’ve also got a video walkthrough of two proposal examples here .

Step 4: Craft a strong introduction chapter

Once your proposal’s been approved, its time to get writing your actual dissertation or thesis! The good news is that if you put the time into crafting a high-quality proposal, you’ve already got a head start on your first three chapters – introduction, literature review and methodology – as you can use your proposal as the basis for these.

Handy sidenote – our free dissertation & thesis template is a great way to speed up your dissertation writing journey.

What’s the introduction chapter all about?

The purpose of the introduction chapter is to set the scene for your research (dare I say, to introduce it…) so that the reader understands what you’ll be researching and why it’s important. In other words, it covers the same ground as the research proposal in that it justifies your research topic.

What goes into the introduction chapter?

This can vary slightly between universities and degrees, but generally, the introduction chapter will include the following:

• A brief background to the study, explaining the overall area of research
• A problem statement , explaining what the problem is with the current state of research (in other words, where the knowledge gap exists)
• Your research questions – in other words, the specific questions your study will seek to answer (based on the knowledge gap)
• The significance of your study – in other words, why it’s important and how its findings will be useful in the world

As you can see, this all about explaining the “what” and the “why” of your research (as opposed to the “how”). So, your introduction chapter is basically the salesman of your study, “selling” your research to the first-time reader and (hopefully) getting them interested to read more.

How do I write the introduction chapter, you ask? We cover that in detail in this post .

Step 5: Undertake an in-depth literature review

As I mentioned earlier, you’ll need to do some initial review of the literature in Steps 2 and 3 to find your research gap and craft a convincing research proposal – but that’s just scratching the surface. Once you reach the literature review stage of your dissertation or thesis, you need to dig a lot deeper into the existing research and write up a comprehensive literature review chapter.

What’s the literature review all about?

There are two main stages in the literature review process:

Literature Review Step 1: Reading up

The first stage is for you to deep dive into the existing literature (journal articles, textbook chapters, industry reports, etc) to gain an in-depth understanding of the current state of research regarding your topic. While you don’t need to read every single article, you do need to ensure that you cover all literature that is related to your core research questions, and create a comprehensive catalogue of that literature , which you’ll use in the next step.

Reading and digesting all the relevant literature is a time consuming and intellectually demanding process. Many students underestimate just how much work goes into this step, so make sure that you allocate a good amount of time for this when planning out your research. Thankfully, there are ways to fast track the process – be sure to check out this article covering how to read journal articles quickly .

Literature Review Step 2: Writing up

Once you’ve worked through the literature and digested it all, you’ll need to write up your literature review chapter. Many students make the mistake of thinking that the literature review chapter is simply a summary of what other researchers have said. While this is partly true, a literature review is much more than just a summary. To pull off a good literature review chapter, you’ll need to achieve at least 3 things:

• You need to synthesise the existing research , not just summarise it. In other words, you need to show how different pieces of theory fit together, what’s agreed on by researchers, what’s not.
• You need to highlight a research gap that your research is going to fill. In other words, you’ve got to outline the problem so that your research topic can provide a solution.
• You need to use the existing research to inform your methodology and approach to your own research design. For example, you might use questions or Likert scales from previous studies in your your own survey design .

As you can see, a good literature review is more than just a summary of the published research. It’s the foundation on which your own research is built, so it deserves a lot of love and attention. Take the time to craft a comprehensive literature review with a suitable structure .

But, how do I actually write the literature review chapter, you ask? We cover that in detail in this video post .

Step 6: Carry out your own research

Once you’ve completed your literature review and have a sound understanding of the existing research, its time to develop your own research (finally!). You’ll design this research specifically so that you can find the answers to your unique research question.

There are two steps here – designing your research strategy and executing on it:

1 – Design your research strategy

The first step is to design your research strategy and craft a methodology chapter . I won’t get into the technicalities of the methodology chapter here, but in simple terms, this chapter is about explaining the “how” of your research. If you recall, the introduction and literature review chapters discussed the “what” and the “why”, so it makes sense that the next point to cover is the “how” –that’s what the methodology chapter is all about.

In this section, you’ll need to make firm decisions about your research design. This includes things like:

• Your research philosophy (e.g. positivism or interpretivism )
• Your overall methodology (e.g. qualitative , quantitative or mixed methods)
• Your data collection strategy (e.g. interviews , focus groups, surveys)
• Your data analysis strategy (e.g. content analysis , correlation analysis, regression)

If these words have got your head spinning, don’t worry! We’ll explain these in plain language in other posts. It’s not essential that you understand the intricacies of research design (yet!). The key takeaway here is that you’ll need to make decisions about how you’ll design your own research, and you’ll need to describe (and justify) your decisions in your methodology chapter.

2 – Execute: Collect and analyse your data

Once you’ve worked out your research design, you’ll put it into action and start collecting your data. This might mean undertaking interviews, hosting an online survey or any other data collection method. Data collection can take quite a bit of time (especially if you host in-person interviews), so be sure to factor sufficient time into your project plan for this. Oftentimes, things don’t go 100% to plan (for example, you don’t get as many survey responses as you hoped for), so bake a little extra time into your budget here.

Once you’ve collected your data, you’ll need to do some data preparation before you can sink your teeth into the analysis. For example:

• If you carry out interviews or focus groups, you’ll need to transcribe your audio data to text (i.e. a Word document).
• If you collect quantitative survey data, you’ll need to clean up your data and get it into the right format for whichever analysis software you use (for example, SPSS, R or STATA).

Once you’ve completed your data prep, you’ll undertake your analysis, using the techniques that you described in your methodology. Depending on what you find in your analysis, you might also do some additional forms of analysis that you hadn’t planned for. For example, you might see something in the data that raises new questions or that requires clarification with further analysis.

The type(s) of analysis that you’ll use depend entirely on the nature of your research and your research questions. For example:

• If your research if exploratory in nature, you’ll often use qualitative analysis techniques .
• If your research is confirmatory in nature, you’ll often use quantitative analysis techniques
• If your research involves a mix of both, you might use a mixed methods approach

Again, if these words have got your head spinning, don’t worry! We’ll explain these concepts and techniques in other posts. The key takeaway is simply that there’s no “one size fits all” for research design and methodology – it all depends on your topic, your research questions and your data. So, don’t be surprised if your study colleagues take a completely different approach to yours.

Step 7: Present your findings

Once you’ve completed your analysis, it’s time to present your findings (finally!). In a dissertation or thesis, you’ll typically present your findings in two chapters – the results chapter and the discussion chapter .

What’s the difference between the results chapter and the discussion chapter?

While these two chapters are similar, the results chapter generally just presents the processed data neatly and clearly without interpretation, while the discussion chapter explains the story the data are telling  – in other words, it provides your interpretation of the results.

For example, if you were researching the factors that influence consumer trust, you might have used a quantitative approach to identify the relationship between potential factors (e.g. perceived integrity and competence of the organisation) and consumer trust. In this case:

• Your results chapter would just present the results of the statistical tests. For example, correlation results or differences between groups. In other words, the processed numbers.
• Your discussion chapter would explain what the numbers mean in relation to your research question(s). For example, Factor 1 has a weak relationship with consumer trust, while Factor 2 has a strong relationship.

Depending on the university and degree, these two chapters (results and discussion) are sometimes merged into one , so be sure to check with your institution what their preference is. Regardless of the chapter structure, this section is about presenting the findings of your research in a clear, easy to understand fashion.

Importantly, your discussion here needs to link back to your research questions (which you outlined in the introduction or literature review chapter). In other words, it needs to answer the key questions you asked (or at least attempt to answer them).

For example, if we look at the sample research topic:

In this case, the discussion section would clearly outline which factors seem to have a noteworthy influence on organisational trust. By doing so, they are answering the overarching question and fulfilling the purpose of the research .

For more information about the results chapter , check out this post for qualitative studies and this post for quantitative studies .

Step 8: The Final Step Draw a conclusion and discuss the implications

Last but not least, you’ll need to wrap up your research with the conclusion chapter . In this chapter, you’ll bring your research full circle by highlighting the key findings of your study and explaining what the implications of these findings are.

What exactly are key findings? The key findings are those findings which directly relate to your original research questions and overall research objectives (which you discussed in your introduction chapter). The implications, on the other hand, explain what your findings mean for industry, or for research in your area.

Sticking with the consumer trust topic example, the conclusion might look something like this:

Key findings

This study set out to identify which factors influence consumer-based trust in British low-cost online equity brokerage firms. The results suggest that the following factors have a large impact on consumer trust:

While the following factors have a very limited impact on consumer trust:

Notably, within the 25-30 age groups, Factors E had a noticeably larger impact, which may be explained by…

Implications

The findings having noteworthy implications for British low-cost online equity brokers. Specifically:

The large impact of Factors X and Y implies that brokers need to consider….

The limited impact of Factor E implies that brokers need to…

As you can see, the conclusion chapter is basically explaining the “what” (what your study found) and the “so what?” (what the findings mean for the industry or research). This brings the study full circle and closes off the document.

Let’s recap – how to write a dissertation or thesis

You’re still with me? Impressive! I know that this post was a long one, but hopefully you’ve learnt a thing or two about how to write a dissertation or thesis, and are now better equipped to start your own research.

To recap, the 8 steps to writing a quality dissertation (or thesis) are as follows:

• Understand what a dissertation (or thesis) is – a research project that follows the research process.
• Find a unique (original) and important research topic
• Craft a convincing dissertation or thesis research proposal
• Write a clear, compelling introduction chapter
• Undertake a thorough review of the existing research and write up a literature review
• Undertake your own research
• Present and interpret your findings

Once you’ve wrapped up the core chapters, all that’s typically left is the abstract , reference list and appendices. As always, be sure to check with your university if they have any additional requirements in terms of structure or content.  

Psst... there’s more!

This post was based on one of our popular Research Bootcamps . If you're working on a research project, you'll definitely want to check this out ...

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Theoretical Framework: Collocation in Systemic Functional Perspectives

• First Online: 23 November 2017

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As we have mentioned in the above chapters, the theoretical framework of this dissertation is Systemic Functional Grammar. This chapter is particularly devoted to the modeling of collocation in Systemic Functional Grammar.

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COMMUNAL stands for Convivial Man-Machine Understanding through Natural Language, a project directed by Dr. Robin Fawcett at the University of Wales College of Cardiff (see Tucker 1996: 175).

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Ding, J. (2018). Theoretical Framework: Collocation in Systemic Functional Perspectives. In: Linguistic Prefabrication. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7010-5_3

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Collocation

There is an essential and simpler guide to collocation in the initial plus section of this site (new tab).

This is quite a long guide so here's a contents list.  If this area is new to you, however, you'd be well advised to read through the guide in the order in which it is set out. Clicking on -top- at the end of each section will bring you back to this menu.

A common enough definition is from Lewis:

Collocations are those combinations of words which occur naturally with greater than random frequency Lewis, 2008: 25

This simple definition hides a good deal of complexity.  We need to understand what is meant by

• combinations of words
• greater than random

and we will tackle these one by one later.

Some of these are almost entirely predictable because they are strong collocations; some are much weaker collocations and far less predictable.

• It's a fair bet that you inserted rain or waterfall in the first gap because the word torrential can only describe a limited number of nouns and only functions as an adjective.
• It is unlikely that you decided on a sports carriage although horse-drawn is a popular choice.  There are few ways that the noun carriage can be described or classified so the choices are rather limited.
• After high you have a very wide choice although it is vanishingly unlikely that you inserted nouns such as ditch, lawn, car, foot etc.  You may have selected a range of other nouns, such as fence, net, window, mountain, table and thousands more possibilities but much less likely that man, tree or baby would have been your choice.
• Again, the sorts of noun that a phrase such as air-conditioning can classify is quite limited and a good bet is to suggest that either system or unit would be popular choices.
• In the second gap, we have an example of a fixed idiomatic binomial expression.  Our choice is limited to the word to and the word fro only occurs in this combination.
• After high in Row 1 you had a very wide choice but the adjective towering is, although a synonym of sorts, much less flexible,  Again, you will not have chosen words like ditch, lawn, car, foot etc.  You may have selected a metaphorical use such as rage or a less figurative use such as trees or mountains .  Movie buffs probably selected inferno. If, however, you assumed that it was a non-finite verb form, it's fairly predictable that you inserted the preposition over after it.
• In the first gap we have a word following what's called an assemblage noun (not a partitive) and you are constrained in English to use a literal word such as birds or sheep but may have opted for a figurative use and chosen something like schoolchildren.   Whichever way you went, your choices are severely limited.
• In the second gap, it is almost certain that most people would insert shut as the only viable possibility in English.  This is a semi-transparent idiom because, given a little context, the meaning is reasonably clear.
• In the third gap, we have a similar situation of a fixed idiom with only sheep as the possible sensible completion.  An idiom such as this is quite opaque in meaning.
• In the first gap, a very wide range of nouns is possible but they will usually be abstract entities such as advantage, problem, issue, event and so on.   It is less likely, but possible, that you selected a so-called concrete noun such as person, woman or monument , however.  Your choices were very wide.
• In the second gap, if you assume that the word gas is a noun, it is likely that you selected something which it can classify such as fire, light or chamber.   If you assumed it was a verb, then your choices are probably limited to nouns which refer to animate entities.
• Finally, we have another noun so we can either describe or classify it so you have a very wide choice of words.  If you chose to classify the noun, you may have selected something like typing, printing, bible, rice or a number of other classifying nouns.  A very wide range of adjectives is available to you, of course, but they will probably not have included heavy or impossible . Less probably, you may have decided to treat the word as a verb and inserted the wall, the living room and so on.  In this case the number of possibilities is quite large but still limited.

The moral of this little exercise is twofold:

• Collocation is not random
• Collocation varies in strength

Incidentally, when discussing collocation, the technical terms for the item we are considering is the node .  So, for example, when we are deciding which nouns can collocate with the adjective irritating the word itself is the node.

If you have followed the guide to lexical relationships, you will be aware of the meaning of syntagmatic rather than a paradigmatic relationships in language.  Briefly:

The summary is:

Each slot in a clause can be replaced by words and phrases in the same word class to make new clauses (some of which might make sense) ad infinitum .  The boxes relate to items in a paradigmatic relationship with each other and the black arrows show the syntagmatic relationships.

Collocation concerns both types of relationships:

• Collocation is a syntagmatic phenomenon insofar as it concerns which sorts of items are more or less likely to co-occur horizontally in a clause.  For example, it is more likely that the verb select will co-occur with an animate subject so we will not usually encounter:     The tree selected     The car selected but any animate subject is possible so     The child selected     I selected     The committee selected     The horse selected and so on are all imaginable.
• Collocation is a paradigmatic phenomenon insofar as it is centrally concerned not with what is possible but with what is likely, conventional and non-random in terms of which items are likely to fill the slots.

In summary:

Exclusion is a key concept within collocation.

Some words collocate so freely that almost no combination is excluded.  For example, the determiner some will collocate with any plural count noun and any mass noun at all so there is almost no way to predict with which nouns it is most likely to co-occur.  For the purposes of analysis, this lack of exclusivity means that it makes no sense to refer to the collocational characteristics of a word like some .

Other words are far less flexible and some almost completely inflexible so, for example, although the adjective good is promiscuous in the nouns which it can be used to describe it is not fully so.  We are unlikely to encounter, e.g.:     a good problem     a good drawback etc. because the adjective is semantically constrained to exclude many negative-connotation nouns.  Not all, however, because:     a good thunderstorm     a good accident etc. are conceivable if ironic in most circumstances.

The phenomenon we are describing, which we will encounter frequently in what follows is semantic exclusion .  It is a meaning issue.

Other words are very exclusive and are severely constrained in terms of co-occurrence.  For example, the word pay collocates quite frequently with a range of nouns ( bills, invoices, the money, attention, the price, dividends etc.). However, the noun attention , which collocates with pay in, e.g.:     Please pay more attention has a much more constraining effect on the verbs of which it can be the object and they are confined almost to pay and give .  What's more, none of the synonyms of pay and give can be used with the noun attention and only heed appears to be a synonym of attention which can also be the object of pay, as in:     Please pay more heed Furthermore, although the verb pay also has a range of near synonyms, foot, settle, disburse, give, shell out etc., only some of these can refer to the same noun:     pay / settle / foot the bill     pay / settle the invoice     pay / disburse / give / shell out the money     give / shell out his pocket money are all acceptable but      *give / shell out / disburse the bill / the invoice are not and we can only have:     foot the bill and not     *foot the invoice etc.

In our examples, the verb pay and the noun attention collocate strongly in one direction (noun to verb), but the same is not true for collocations in the other direction (verb to noun) which are much less exclusive.  There is, in the jargon, asymmetric reciprocity which is explained a little more fully later.

Most authorities will agree that there are two forms of collocation to consider: grammatical and lexical.

A simple way to remember this difference is to see that combinations which include function words are grammatical and those between content words are lexical. In English, the content words are open-class items (i.e., ones to which new additions are possible if not frequent) and involve nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. Functional (or structural words) are closed-class items (i.e. ones to which new additions are very rare if not impossible) and involve prepositions, determiners, conjunctions and pronouns. Therefore:

Any combination of two or more lexical words is lexical collocation Any combination which includes functional words is grammatical collocation

In this site, the latter is referred to as colligation and analysed elsewhere (see the link below).

Naturally, some collocations are stronger than others.  The nature of collocation can be illustrated like this:

There is probably no principled way in which we can always distinguish, e.g., a strong collocation from an idiom or a binomial although it is easy enough to identify examples of one or the other.

• Idioms These are pretty much fixed and unalterable expressions in a language.  For example, someone can be described as     a one-man band     a jack of all trades     the life and soul of the party etc. Things can be talked about as     the odd one out     a blessing in disguise     chicken feed     a flash in the pan and so on. There are literally thousands of such expressions in every language which people can deploy almost as if they were single words, saving thinking time and maintaining fluency. There is a guide to idiomaticity, linked at the end, where more detail is to be had. The important thing about this kind of collocation is its noncompositionality, i.e., the whole phrase has to be understood as a single item and cannot be broken down into its constituent parts to get at the meaning.
• Binomials and invariable collocations Binomials are a special sort of idiom made up of two elements which always appear in the same order.  If they are nouns, they are often used with a singular verb form because they represent a single concept (we say, e.g., supply and demand is the issue not are the issue ). Binomials often contain words found in no other contexts.  Examples are:     to and fro     thunder and lightning     spic and span     neither here nor there     in and out     cheap and nasty etc. There are also some trinomials in English such as     left, right and centre     bell, book and candle     cool, calm and collected     hook, line and sinker etc. A small subset in this category comprises invariable collocations in which only one combination is usually possible in only one order such as:     from top to bottom     back to front     duck a question     stage a play This kind of collocation is sometimes referred to as Siamese twins.  The elements are, in other words, both inseparable and unalterable in the way that other, weaker collocations are not. Many of these types of strong collocation (and others) are used figuratively as well as literally so, for example:     hook, line and sinker refers to fishing tackle but in     She swallowed the story hook, line and sinker it is used figuratively to suggest that someone was completely gulled into believing something untrue. These are called duplex expressions and there is more on them below under meaning and in the guide to idiomaticity on this site, linked below. For example:     His speech was short and sweet     It was something I could not aid and abet     Foreign and domestic policies are being reconsidered     It's a rough and ready rule In the legal profession, there are many more of these and they include, for example:     heirs and successors     assault and battery     expressed or implied     fit and proper and many others.
• Strong collocations These can almost always be predicted by native speakers of a language (or at least have very few alternatives).  Typically they allow a choice of words but at only one point in the phrase or clause.  For example, if you are asked to fill the gap in the following, your answer is probably quite predictable. Please __________ free to ask any questions . Some of these collocations allow a choice at two points in the clause or phrase.  For example: swat / squash a fly / wasp / bug cook / prepare / make a meal / dinner / food / some grub etc. Other strong collocations are adjective-noun combinations.  The number of possible adjectives for rain is large but not infinite ( heavy, light, drizzly, hard, thin etc.) and exclude adjectives such as strong, powerful etc. Some authors will place all phrasal, prepositional and phrasal-prepositional verbs in the category of grammatical collocation.  On this site, they are considered separately.

• Textual collocation This refers to the tendency for sets of words to occur together in a text on a particular topic.  A text about families will probably include, e.g.:     home, children, parents, arguments and so on but one about smoking would have     cigarette, health, addictive, nicotine, secondary etc.

If you want to know more about idioms and binomials, see the guide to idiomaticity on this site, linked at the end. If you want to know more about delexicalisation, see the guide to the lexical approach also linked at the end.

The citation from Lewis included the phrase: combinations of words and it is time to address what sorts of combinations we can focus on for analysis.

Lexical collocations can be classified by word class.  This is often a useful way to limit one's focus in the classroom and help learners to identify collocations of a particular sort so they are, for example, only trying to notice particular combinations of words, not all combinations. At lower levels, the most important combinations are probably adjective + noun and verb + noun as these are very frequent and frequently variable across languages.

The six areas we shall look at are:

You can test yourself to make sure you can recognise stronger and weaker collocation of these six types by clicking here .

Many combinations are excluded for semantic reasons so, for example, we cannot have:      *short giant     *distinguish similarity     *deafeningly quiet     *window wood     *clarify obscurely     *ascend down the valley and none of these should cause any difficulty because semantic exclusion of this sort is common across all languages (and common sense).

Before we can get on to analysing the six types of lexical collocations identified above, we need to consider some key concepts and return to our definition of collocation.

The relationships between collocating lexemes is often unequal.  There is, in other words, asymmetrical reciprocity .  For example, the noun interest collocates with a wide range of adjectives such as:      great interest     keen interest     obvious interest     sudden interest     academic interest     personal interest     public interest     special interest     romantic interest and hundreds of other adjectives including:      vested interest The adjective vested , however, only collocates with the noun interest and has no other combination in general English, although in legal and economic registers we may encounter the technical uses of the terms vested property and vested authority . (We are leaving aside the term vested to mean wearing a vest , by the way.) Once we have used the term vested , we have almost no choice at all but to follow it with the noun interest .  However, when we use the noun interest , we are not constrained in anything like the same way in our selection of an appropriate adjective to modify it. That is what is meant by asymmetrical reciprocity: collocation does not work equally in both directions. The key is to identify what is sometimes referred to as the pivotal element in the collocation, i.e., the element which is the determining factor limiting the range of possibilities for the other element. Here are some more examples:

The number of nouns which can combine with the adjective heavy is huge and will include:     weight, car, man, breathing, metal, plate, computer, stone, table, brick, key, ashtray and almost every other noun which is not in itself associated with something light, such as feather or bubble .  The number of possible nouns runs into many thousands. However, if we take any of these nouns, it is easy to see that the number of adjectives which can be used to modify them is much smaller than the number of nouns which can be modified by heavy . For example, the noun rain can be modified by heavy but it is clear that the number of other adjectives we can use with this noun is limited and it is almost possible to produce a complete list confined to:

You may be able to think of a few others but the list is clearly not anything like as long as the list of nouns which can be described as heavy .  The list of possible adjectives would be much shorter in cases such as computer, ashtray, breathing etc. As we saw above, the adjective torrential can only be used with a small number of nouns and it is possible to come up with a list such as:

and it is quite possible that not all native speakers of English would accept all those as natural combinations.  Given that there are probably around 70,000 nouns in English, this means that the adjective torrential collocates with only 0.02% of them.  In other words, if you try to use the word randomly to modify any noun you come across, you have a 99.98% chance of being wrong.

Other sorts of collocation work the same way so, for example, the list of nouns which can be the object of the verb make is very long but the list of verbs which can have bed as the object is very much shorter. The verb babble is also a pivotal or constraining element as is its derived participle adjective babbling and, apart from babies and streams, brooks, becks and rivulets it collocates with very few nouns naturally even though its meaning (to talk rapidly and incomprehensibly) is common enough and could be applied to many types of people and noise-producing objects.  Native speakers might or might not accept     babbling tourists     babbling foreigners     babbling gossips     babbling people etc. as natural combinations.

There is a classroom implication that we need to focus on collocations which are limited, not on those which are so numerous that they can't be taught. Hence, the focus on exclusion at the beginning of this guide.

Collocation may be described as the study of how lexemes conventionally co-occur (are combinations in Lewis's definition) but that does not necessarily mean that they must be juxtaposed.  For example, we may have:      the dense fog in which the words are juxtaposed, or      the fog was / became / looked dense in which the collocating noun and adjective are separated only by the copulas be, become or look , but we could also have:      the fog which rolled down the mountain that morning grew increasingly dense in which the collocates are separated by nine other words. This is clearly a teaching issue because learners may not be able easily to spot the collocating items in the following unless they are highlighted in some way, as they are here with one example of each of the six main types of lexical collocation:

• The landscape over which they were travelling that morning was featureless
• My hotel bill is the first thing that I need to settle
• She was deeply , and quite obviously to me, upset
• The chocolate looked absolutely delicious so I bought three bars
• He strongly and persistently, throughout the bad-tempered meeting, argued his point
• They fell irretrievably and quite hopelessly into debt

The citation from Lewis at the beginning included the expression: with greater than random frequency .

Language, however, is a non-random phenomenon.  It is not the case that one language lexeme may be followed by any other with absolutely equal, i.e., random, probability because language is a rule-based system.

The Oxford English Dictionaries website states that:

The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use ... Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes etc. And these figures don't take account of entries with senses for different word classes (such as noun and adjective). https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-words-are-there-in-the-english-language/

If we assume, therefore, that we have around 85,000 nouns which could conceivably be the subjects of around 25,000 verbs, the number of possible combinations of noun + verb is well over 2 billion.  The number of possible adjective + noun combinations would be over 3.5 billion. This is clearly not a tenable conclusion and most combinations of words are, in fact, excluded for one of two main reasons.

For example, if a clause begins:      Because she ... it cannot be completed with just any item in the language because the choices are constrained by the grammar and the meaning systems.

• Grammar because the word cannot, for example, be followed by opening, difficult, so, in the garden, familiar with, all, were or house because there are word-class and other structural constraints which follow from the rules of English grammar.  In fact, because neither a noun nor an adjective can come next, something like 75% of the words in English are already excluded. The linguistic systems of the language will mean, therefore, that only a verb phrase, with or without an adverbial, can follow our example.  That still leaves around 25,000 verbs in the language which could conceivably come next. This is not, strictly speaking, an example of grammatical collocation (see above for that) but an artefact of the language's grammar.
• Selectional restrictions To take a non-verb example, meaning will require that the adjectives influential, tiny, glittering, pollinating etc. are unlikely to occur collocated with the noun elephant simply because the ideas of an influential, tiny, glittering or pollinating elephant are not ones that makes sense to (most) users of a language. Equally, the subject noun an elephant is unlikely to occur with verbs such as explain, buzz, explode, drone, meditate, apologise and so on because that is not what elephants do (presumably). The number of ways to finish the sentence which begins:     Because the elephant ... is therefore severely limited by the nature of elephants.  Grammatically, of course, most of the 25,000 English verbs can follow but only a very small percentage of that number will make any sense. With an adjective such as studious for example, we would presuppose a person as the reference because animals and inanimate entities cannot by the nature of the way the world works be studious . On the other hand, an adjective such as asymmetrical is very unlikely to be applied to a person because it is simply not a characteristic of most people and one such as electromagnetic has a much more limited range of possible nouns which it can modify. Of course, in poetic language, when all bets are off in this regard, almost any combination is allowed for effect.  Most of us, however, are not teaching English to aspiring poets.
• Collocation restrictions These are more central to our concern here and much more arbitrary because they do not depend on our encyclopaedic knowledge of the way the world operates. For example, in English you brush your teeth but in German you clean your teeth and in other languages other verbs will be used (including polish ) on a more or less random basis.  In English, too, we take a taxi but catch a train and in other languages, again, different verbs will be used and the concept of catching something as large as a train is obscure.

What is meant by non-random collocation is, therefore, not a matter of random vs. systematic phenomena, it is a matter of comparative degrees of probability.  It is an analogue, not a digital phenomenon.  Degrees of probability are determined grammatically and semantically. There are, in other words, regularities in the collocational systems of a language, any language, which reduce randomness but the system is not random to begin with.

Collocational aspects of many words vary according to the context (i.e., field of discourse) in which they occur.  For example, within a business context a verb such as grow might collocate with market or business as in:     We need to grow the market or      They grew the business year on year but in non-context-specific fields, the verb usually means cultivate as in, e.g.:     I grow vegetables or intransitively to mean get larger as in     The children are growing quickly All specialist fields (registers) have their own internal jargon (or specific terminology to be more polite) so, whereas a teacher of language might refer to:     intermediate level a legislator might refer to     creating a level playing field a builder might refer to      foundation level and a sports commentator might suggest a competitor is able to     level the score . The example above with the verb map is clearly set in an IT context but a geographer would probably use the verb quite differently and with different noun objects such as:      map the transport links.

These considerations do not solely apply to verbs, although verb-noun collocations are good examples of the working of register influences:

• Adjectives such as strategic will be used differently, and collocate differently in military, chess-playing and economic registers     strategic weapons     strategic moves     strategic industries respectively, for example. (See also the way vested collocates across registers, noted above.)
• Adverbs such as healthily will be used differently and be differently collocated by nutritionists and economists     eat healthily and     profit healthily for example.
• Nouns such as turbulence will be used differently and be differently collocated by social commentators, scientists and marital counsellors     street turbulence     turbulence of an airflow     turbulence in a relationship for example. In management-speak, one might encounter the term payroll orphans (workers who have been fired) but that combination of nouns is unlikely to appear in any other register.

Context, as usual in language teaching, is crucial.

A concept closely allied to register is style (so closely, in fact that the terms are routinely confused). Style is influential in the selection of collocating words because although:     settle the bill     pay the bill     foot the bill are all example of phrasal synonymy, as we have seen, they are stylistically variable from the formal to the neutral and the informal, respectively.

All the sorts of lexical combinations which are identified above are subject to stylistic variations so we may have, for example:

Informally, verb plus prepositional phrase collocations are frequently alternatives to more formal verbs.  It is also averred that verb + adverb or adverbial combinations are less formal than single-word parallels (at least when an alternative exists).  For example:      go to the next stage      go on are less formal than     proceed and      throw away is less formal than     discard

For more, see the guide to style and register linked in the list of related guides at the end.

The citation from Lewis also included the phrase: combinations of words which occur naturally .  The term naturally here needs a little investigation because it is gradable concept not an on-off attribute of anything.  We can define natural in many ways but the essence is that it is not contrived or contrary to some kind of usual, ordinary or expected law.

Naturally(!), among speakers of any language, opinions will vary and what one speaker finds a perfectly natural combination of words may appear to another as false, poorly formed or clumsy at best, plain wrong at worst. For example, would you be happy to accept all the following as being 'natural'?

More to the point, do you think everyone who speaks English as a first language would agree?

It is, in fact, especially with weak- or medium-strength collocations, very difficult to decide what is and is not natural.  However, to help us these days, we have access via corpus research to very large samples of natural language data from which we can see the patterns that are frequent, those that are unusual and those that do not occur or are vanishingly rare. However, frequency is not necessarily a measure of naturalness because some combinations of words can be infrequent but natural because they are confined to certain unusual registers and/or contexts. For example, the terms:     compose language     creep soundlessly     careful operation     heritage phenomena     downsized workforce     matrix management are, according to some corpus research, really quite rare but the fact that they do occur with more much than random frequency implies that they are natural enough and few speakers of the language would wince if they read or heard them in particular contexts. Unfortunately, teachers are rarely able to access corpus research findings in real time in the classroom (although they can when planning what to teach) so we are thrown back on our intuitions about language which may or may not be typical of the speech community we represent.

It is rare, in any case, for false collocation to result in incomprehensibility and all these examples of probably false collocations are clear in terms of the speaker / writer's intentions:     She was deeply overjoyed     They opted for their Member of the Senate     He was expelled from the army     He has a group of fish in his pond     The wind was very heavy     She rode a new vehicle to work     I need to get a new square of glass put in the window     He dived profoundly in the river     She spoke with happiness So, we should not become too fixated on the issue of natural collocations, especially at lower levels where communication of an idea will often be more important than natural-sounding language.

The point is made below, however, that learners expect some certainty in terms of what they are told about language and telling them that, for example:      Well, yes 'strong rain' and 'boiling sunshine' are possible, I guess, but I wouldn't say it is rarely reassuring or helpful.

The point is made below, too, that many multi-purpose nouns, often hypernyms, do not form very natural-sounding collocations so, for example:     a box of cigarettes     a group of furniture     a container of paint all sound slightly unnatural but, failing mastery of the terms carton, suite and pot , they will communicate effectively.  See below for more on noun + noun collocations of this sort. Equally, mastery of multi-purpose verb phrases such as begin to do / play will often stand learners in good stead if they do not know how to say, e.g.:      go in for golf or      take up knitting etc.

A point made above concerned the limited range of prime verbs in English whose mastery allows learners to express an enormous range of ideas with few linguistic resources.  Those verbs are:     be | bring | come | do | get | give | go | keep | make | put | take and it is possible to use them to get one's meaning across even if what one says is collocationally flawed.     The courier brought the parcel to the office might be better rendered with a verb which collocates more obviously with the object noun as     The courier delivered the parcel to the office but the sense is unimpaired using a prime verb. Moreover, because prime verbs are often delexicalised, their collocates are very numerous and the use of prime verbs will often sound quite natural, especially informally.

Traditionally, collocation is analysed in terms of identifying which words naturally co-occur and then selecting, analysing, listing and teaching them in a way that endeavours to make sense of a very wide area of language study.  Lewis (2008) advocates encouraging learners to notice co-occurrences of words and become aware of how words they know form partnerships with others. However, if different forms of meaning are processed differently by human brains, as may well be the case, there is some mileage in looking at the different types of meaning which are encoded in collocations one may encounter in a language.

What follows draws heavily on Macis and Schmitt (2017) although they are not alone in noticing that meaning may be sidelined in the pursuit of an understandable and accessible way of presenting and teaching some of the huge numbers of natural collocations in the language.  Others, for example, Xiao and McEnery (2006), cited later, are also focused on meaning rather than structure.

Macis and Schmitt consider three types of meaning encoded in collocating phrases (although they draw on a small number (54) of collocations of adjective + noun and verb + noun collocations only).

If, as is claimed, not only in the study cited above, the figurative meanings of collocations may make up as much as 25% of all collocations, there are classroom implications so, teachers need, according to Macis and Schmitt, to:

• Be alert to any possible figurative meanings of collocations that they intend their learners to encounter and notice.
• Be aware of and use corpora data to set collocations in useful co-texts.
• Help learners to guess from context and co-text whether a phrase is meant figuratively or literally by exposing them to both kinds of use.
• Encourage learners in the use of dedicated collocation dictionaries (see below for a little more on these).

This sort of admonition applies equally, of course to the teaching of any lexis so will not come as a sudden revelation. Macis and Schmitt recognise this when they conclude:

collocations cannot be seen as merely the co-occurrence of words. With collocations, just as with individual words, meaning matters. (op cit.: 58)

Some forms of lexical collocation are more frequent and more frequently troublesome for learners but they are all important (with the possible exception of verb plus prepositional phrases) to cover if our learners' ambition to sound natural (whatever that means) in English is to be fulfilled.  Adjective + noun and verb + noun have already been identified as important areas.

We can now look in a little more detail at these six types one by one.

Some adjectives are so promiscuous that almost no exclusion is possible and these include:      good, nice, pleasant, lovely     bad, unpleasant, ugly, difficult and so on. These adjectives will not collocate with all nouns, of course, because certain combinations are semantically virtually impossible, such as:      unpleasant enjoyment     pleasant illness     difficult weather etc. However, the range of nouns that they will collocate with is so large as to be impossible to list exhaustively.  They form, in other words, such weak collocations that they do not commend themselves as a teaching target.

Other adjectives (most of them) form medium-strength collocations and can be the target of our teaching and these include:      heavy, strong, weighty, dense, thick, high, tall, substantial, fat     light, bright, elegant, easy, simple, gentle, cheerful, happy , thin and so on.  The list can be extended very considerably but this is a guide, not a dictionary or thesaurus. With these adjectives, it is possible to extract certain patterns which can act as rules of thumb for learners to use.  For example:

Some adjectives form very strong collocations as we saw with the example of vested interest above.  Other, less extreme, examples include:     torrential rain     violent crime     glittering career     spoken language / word     sunken ship / boat     superhuman strength / efforts / feat     drifting snow etc.

attributive and predicative adjective use

Most adjectives can be used attributively and predicatively.  In the former case, the collocation tends to be stronger and more obvious.  For example:     There were some anxious parents outside the school vs .:     The parents outside the school were anxious or      She made a rapid rise to the top of the business vs. :     Her rise to the top of the business was rapid. This is even more the case when the adjective in question is participial.  In the latter case, the word is likely to be interpreted as a verbal use rather than purely adjectival.  For example:     I walked in the freezing rain and wind vs .:     The rain and wind I walked in were freezing or     The written word was more memorable vs .:     The more memorable word was written

classifier vs . epithet

Certain adjectives take on enhanced collocational strength when used as classifiers (determining the type of noun) or epithets (describing the noun).  For example:     S he wrote a short book uses short as an epithet to describe the book , and is not a particularly strong collocation, but     She wrote a short story is used to classify the kind of story, is not, in this sense, gradable and is a much stronger collocation, verging on a compound noun. Compare, too:     He worked in one of the compact offices upstairs with     He bought a compact disc

Many verbs have no particular collocational characteristics but do exhibit semantic exclusion by their nature.  For example, because of the meanings of the verbs we do not allow:     cut the sky     envelop the letter     decide the similarity     identify the weather and thousands of other combinations which simply do not make sense (in any language). One obvious distinction is that, non-poetically and non-metaphorically, we restrict a range of verbs such as decide, oppose, prefer etc. to animate, often human, subjects and others, such as flicker, resonate, ring, tick, slam, snap, burn etc. to inanimate subjects.  Metaphorically, we can use something like:     She slammed out the door, her patience having finally snapped but the power of such items rests in ignoring not adhering to the normal collocational characteristics of the verbs.

Some verbs are only used in English with a certain set of nouns and some nouns require a reciprocally restricted range of verbs of which they can be the object.  For example:

Here, too, the semantic properties of the items will exclude certain combinations in all languages so we can't allow:     *ecstatically miserable     *miserably happy     *genuinely false     *openly untruthful and so on because such expressions are internally contradictory or oxymoronic.  With adverbs, then, we need to match meaning reciprocally so we do allow:     ecstatically happy     miserably depressed     genuinely honest     openly relieved etc. because the meanings of the two elements are complementary. When the adjective from which an adverb is derived and the following adjective are too close in meaning, however, we cannot combine the terms so we don't allow:     *sadly unhappy     *cheerfully happy     *solitarily alone etc. The simple rule is that in order to form an acceptable collocation, the adverb and the adverb must contribute separately to the meaning of the phrase, not just be repetitious.

However, intensifying adverbs are another matter.  They come in three forms and their meaning can usually be summarised as very.  How they collocate is often a question of gradability.

• With gradable adjectives the adverbs may indicate the extreme of the scale (up or down) so we will get, e.g.:     extremely likely     highly preferable     insufferably hot     slightly warm     marginally preferable     very interesting     rather ugly and so on.
• With non-gradable, on-off adjectives, or adjectives which already represent the extreme of a scale, adverbs simple enhance the meaning so we may have, e.g.:     hopelessly addicted     deeply mistaken     wholly unique     perfectly complete     totally wrong     wholly ecstatic     perfectly atrocious etc.

The two sorts of amplifiers cannot be used interchangeably.  Those reserved for gradable adjectives such as extremely, enormously, particularly, insufferably, noticeably etc. do not work with non-gradable or extreme adjectives so we do not find:     *enormously complete     *particularly dead     *noticeably perfect     *slightly atrocious     *very detestable etc. and we cannot use those amplifiers which work for non-gradable senses with gradable adjectives so, e.g.:     *wholly cold     *completely hot     *highly tall     *perfectly old     *indescribably nice     *totally lovely are all disallowed.

• Emphasisers work to express the speaker / writer's feelings and will collocate very widely so we can have, e.g.:     plainly / obviously / clearly / doubtlessly + right / wrong / good / bad / pleasant / unpleasant and almost any other adjective so combinations such as     definitely good     obviously difficult     clearly enjoyable and so on are all allowed. Because the adverb is acting to express the speaker / writer's view, these items do not take their collocational characteristics from the adjectives.  In fact, the lack of any form of reciprocity leads us to believe that they are not collocational phenomena at all.
• Compromisers reduce the speaker / writer's sense of certainty, e.g.:     quite interesting     sort of helpful etc. Again, because these express the speaker / writer's position collocation, if it can be called that at all, can occur with almost any adjective.
• Minimisers downplay the strength of an adjective so collocate most naturally with gradable items as in, e.g.:     slightly interesting     probably important etc. and not     *slightly perfect     *more or less adult etc.
• Approximators serve to suggest that something is almost but not wholly the case so they collocate most naturally with non-gradable adjectives as in, e.g.:     almost unique     virtually perfect etc. but not with gradable concepts such as:     *almost hot     *virtually chilly     *nearly old

Noun + noun collocations occur preponderantly in four forms:

• Compounds or potential compounds Where the line is drawn between strongly collocating nouns and true compound nouns is not clear cut.  For example, we can have weak collocations such as:     loudspeaker switch and there are numerous other nouns which will collocate with either element:     loudspeaker positions     loudspeaker cable     loudspeaker controls     light switch     light dimmer     light controls etc. However, other very strong collocations are, or may become, compound nouns rather than being obviously the subject of collocation.  For example:     light + bulb → light-bulb     lamp + shade → lampshade     dish + washer → dishwasher A simple but slightly unreliable test of whether a combination represents a compound or simply a medium or strong collocation is to pronounce the pairs.  Compounds are usually stressed on the first item. For more on compounding, see the guide, linked in the list at the end.
• Collective nouns Collective nouns proper are those which represent a collection of entities and to which it is not necessary to add the of -phrase so we do not, for example, often see:     an army of soldiers     a family of relations     a congregation of worshippers     the cavalry of horse riders     a jury of jurywomen and so on because the collective noun contains the concept of what makes it up.
• Assemblages are nouns to represent the whole made up of its parts and some collocate very strongly with certain things or people.  There are lots of these and many of them, especially those for the animal world, are made up or vanishingly rare.  Common ones are:     flock of sheep / goats / birds     litter of kittens / puppies     pack of dogs / wolves / cards     shoal of fish     squad of soldiers     swarm of bees     a gang of criminals and so on.  The number of nouns which collocate in this way is limited and teachable, unless one wants to get bogged down with a murder of crows, an exultation of larks, a bank of monitors, choir of angels, nest of vipers and a murmuration of starlings , of course.  A hunt on the web for collective nouns will provide long, useless lists and many will not actually be true assemblage nouns. In terms of colligation or grammatical collocation is it worth observing that both assemblage and collective nouns proper are grammatically singular but often collocate with a plural verb form.  We can have, therefore:     the squad of players is here     the squad of players are here     the jury have reached a verdict     the jury has reached a verdict The use of the plural is either a form of proximity concord (in which the influence of the second plural noun disposes the speaker to use a plural form of the verb) or notional concord (in which the speaker / writer perceives the assembly to be made up of its individuals because they are known). In most languages and many varieties of English, including AmE, the singular form is the invariable choice.

• Classifiers Many nouns are used quasi-adjectivally to classify other nouns and many of these combinations also verge on compound nouns.  Examples of nouns acting as classifiers (which differ from adjectives in that they do not describe, they classify) are:     a village pump     a brick wall     a plastic toothbrush     an electric fire     a customs officer     a paper plate etc. See the note above under adjective-noun combinations where it is observed that adjectives used as classifiers increase the collocation strength of the phrase.

Adverbs may precede or follow the verb and may be separated from it by other adverbials so we encounter, for example:     He drove into the garage carefully in which the adverb is separated from the collocating verb by a prepositional phrase     He carefully drove into the garage in which the adverb precedes the verb      He drove carefully into the garage in which the adverb follows the verb In all these cases we can legitimately speak of verb + adverb collocates without implying which comes before which.

Again, many adverb + verb combinations are allowed or excluded for semantic rather than purely collocational reasons so we do not encounter     *saunter quickly     *stroll excitedly     *gallop slowly     *laugh miserably     *weep happily and hundreds of other possible combinations because the verbs themselves imply the kinds of behaviour they express. This is common to all languages and unlikely to be a source of difficulty. As we saw with verb + noun collocations, however, when both items contribute to the meaning, collocation is frequent so we see:     saunter casually     stroll quietly     laugh happily and so on. Again, both parts must normally contribute, not simple repeat the same meaning so:     *heat warmly     *sleep unconsciously     *fill fully     *relax leisurely etc. do not occur. There are numerous exceptions in which the speaker / writer wants to emphasise the verb with an adverb so we do encounter, e.g.:     stroll slowly     hurtle rapidly     race quickly etc.  These tautologies are often considered stylistically questionable.

Excluded from consideration here are those verbs whose combinations with adverbs produces a new meaning.  These are considered in the guide to multi-word verbs.  They include, e.g.:     speak up     come to     bring about and many, many more.

We need to be slightly careful to distinguish between adverbs as adjuncts, integral to the clause and modifying how the verb is perceived, and adverbs as disjuncts (or sentence adverbials) whose function is discoursal and whose role is to modify the whole of the clause to which it applies.  For example:     He spoke clearly at the meeting contains an adjunct adverb ( clearly ) which tells us how he spoke.  However,     Clearly, he spoke at the meeting contains the same adverb functioning as a disjunct and expressing the speaker's notion of the truth of the proposition.  It tells us nothing about how he spoke so is not, therefore, an instance of collocation.  Compare, too:     He told me honestly what he thought which is an example of how honestly collocates with many verbs to do with communication including speak, explain, talk, communicate and others and     Honestly, he told me what he thought in which the adverb is a disjunct and expresses the way the speaker wants the hearer to understand what is said.

There is a range of more general-purpose adverbs which collocate naturally with a limited range of verbs.  For example:

There is some doubt whether most verb + prepositional phrase combinations count as collocations at all because:

• The combinations are usually perfectly predictable from an understanding of the basic meaning(s) the preposition can realise so, for example:     waiting for a bus     hoping for rain     deciding on an answer and so on simply require the learner to understand the preposition.  They may be examples of colligation (insofar as, for example, wait, look, wish and hope are all primed to take a prepositional phrase with for ) but not, technically, of lexical collocation.
• Many combinations are verb + adverb particle rather than prepositional phrases at all so are better analysed as multi-word verbs.  So, for example:     break out the sandwiches     call in the police and so on are phrasal verbs + objects, not verbs + prepositional phrases.
• Other combinations are better analysed as prepositional verbs so, e.g.:     complain about the service     rely on his help     account for his behaviour are all examples of prepositional multi-word verbs.

That said, there are some idiomatic uses which are less easily analysed as anything but strong collocations, verging on clichés or fixed idioms.  Examples include:     He burst into song     They burst into tears     She exploded with anger      It collapsed in a heap     It burnt to the ground etc. which are not prepositional verbs in the true sense.

The other issue is that these combinations are not lexical at all by the definition with which we introduced this guide.  They are grammatical collocations because they involve function words. If, however, you take the view that the prepositional phrase is a semantic unit rather than a syntactical one, then calling these expressions examples of lexical collocation is legitimate and defensible.

These terms are used in the literature to describe the same phenomenon.  The issue is one of synonymy and semantic fields and whether certain lexemes tend to collocate more frequently or reliably with others which have either negative or positive connotations. This is a development of the principle of semantic exclusion that we saw above but is slightly more idiomatic and difficult to acquire. Here are some examples of what is meant:

Words which are generally defined as having no particular connotation, either positive or negative, can acquire connotations depending on the selection of a collocate.  A well-known example appears in:     The cause of the fire in which the word cause simply means reason for and is neutral. However, as we saw above, the verb is almost always used for negative events so we have, e.g.:     This caused a problem     She caused the fight     That was the cause of the accident etc. but we rarely encounter:     That caused his success     She caused some laughter or     This caused her happiness If, however, we do select these positive collocating nouns, the verb assumes a more positive sense.  (And in the second of these examples, the negative sense of the verb is so strong that it may well refer to unkind laughter rather than happiness.)

Examples in political speeches and statements are also common so while the word benefit in, for example:     A benefit of this machine is its quietness we are clearly using the word benefit positively.  However, in:     Benefits and other underserved handouts to people the word becomes, by association, negative. In most reference books, the term Brussels is merely the name of the capital of Belgium.  Use the word as a classifier in, e.g.:     Brussels bureaucrats however, and it automatically assumes a negative connotation for many. In an expression such as     recent immigrant the word immigrant has no particular connotation.  Ally it, however to illegal and it becomes pejorative. By the same token, the word countryside is normally considered neutral but describe it as threatened, precious or British and for many it takes on very positive associations.

When you set out to teach collocation, it is worth bearing in mind that many collocations are translatable, word-for-word across languages.  Check beforehand and do a little comparative language work before teaching something your learners already know.

Some of the analysis above draws on what are called corpora.  Essentially, these are extremely large samples of language data which can be used to investigate frequencies of and concordances between words and that lies at the heart of collocational research. Some extremely useful corpora are available free of charge online and can be used by teachers to investigate the ways in which words combine (and with what kinds of other words) to make meaning. You may, for example, intuitively know that     a positive result is more common or natural than      a positive consequence but relying purely on one person's intuition is not always trustworthy and a little research may be called for. One very useful place to look is https://corpus.byu.edu .  You will have to register, probably, but once you have, the use of the various corpora on that site is free. There are some provisos, however:

• Corpora draw on a variety of data – written, spoken, colloquial, academic and so on – so you need to decide on the context for the language you want to investigate.
• If your focus is on General English, then you would be well advised to use a corpus of data which focuses on a variety of text types.  The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), for example, draws data from spoken language, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers and academic texts.  Other may be more restrictive.
• Some corpora cover a long period (Google books, for example, considers texts written from the 16th century onwards) so may not reflect modern usage.
• Some corpora are register specific so will reflect how words are used in certain settings only.  If you want to know about the everyday, colloquial use of a word, you would be well advised not to use a corpus based, for example, on United States Supreme Court decisions. On the other hand, if you are teaching English for Academic Purposes then a list such as the Academic Word List (available as an appendix in Schmitt, 2000:182 et seq. ) will be most useful.
• Size matters when it comes to corpora and they vary considerably from the 14 billion words in the new iWeb corpus down to 50 or 100 million words in other corpora.
• Frequency matters, too, and, although items like whiteboard or role play may not be particularly frequent, they are almost essential to know for learners of English.  Using frequency as the sole measure of whether to teach a word is perilous because learners may need a less frequent term such as container rather than be troubled, especially at lower levels, to learn the more frequent but restricted items like box, can, tin, jar, bottle, carton, packet, tube, crate, case and so on.
• Individuals vary considerably in terms of the language they need and the registers in which they want to use English.  The term transfer fee may not be particular frequent but is important to football fans and a term like baste is rare but important to those interested in cooking.  If you happen to be hard of hearing , then you need that collocation or idiom, if you are not, you probably don't.

It has often been averred, by linguists particularly interested in corpus research, that corpora are invariably a better guide to collocation and naturalness than the intuitions of any single speaker of the language. The reasoning is that corpora are both objective and huge and the data they present is drawn from much more than any one speaker of the language could possible encounter in a lifetime. Most linguists (including those interested mostly in grammar, such as Chomsky) are perfectly happy to rely on intuition as a guide to identifying well-formed and acceptable language but many are much less happy to give the same credit to a speaker's intuition regarding lexical use. There is often an observable mismatch between the data produced from corpora research and the intuitions of experienced speakers of the language and the assumption, made by those most interested in corpora, is frequently that it is the intuitions rather than corpus data which are faulty. That may not be the case.

For example, one study which attempted to compare intuition with corpora data focused on the word feet and asked native speakers to identify frequent collocates of the noun. What happened, somewhat predictably, is that the speakers used their intuitions and responded with words which applied to the use of feet as a body part.  Corpora research, also unsurprisingly, show that the most frequent collocates for the word feet are to do with the measurement unit of 30.48 centimetres.  This, the study concludes is evidence that intuition is an unreliable guide. Is it?  It seems arguable that frequency here is not a good guide to usefulness. Speakers of the language may also be better than corpora in intuitively recognising in the classroom issues of semantic exclusion discussed above, not because their ideas about the frequency of items are sound (in most cases they are not) but because they can look holistically at the language and make assumptions and judgements based on more than frequency alone. Some of the above is drawn from research by McGee (2006).

One consequence of the development of corpora is to usher in a golden age for lexicographers and modern learners' dictionaries are now much better than they were at identifying and presenting common collocations.  They are a very productive resource for those who have the leisure to consult them while writing. Additionally, dedicated collocation dictionaries are now available and most draw heavily (or solely) on corpus research.  As a resource for reference purposes such books are, naturally, very helpful but a text such as the Oxford Collocations Dictionary which claims to include " over 250,000 collocations and over 75,000 examples " is daunting at the least, useless at worst.  A saving grace of that reference source is that it has included " Special pages that each pull together collocations on a particular topic such as business, meetings, and sport " and register is, indeed, an important issue in collocation work as we saw above. Naturalness in the use of collocations in English is not likely to be enhanced by constant reference to a resource of this kind. A better approach may be to use the patterning we have analysed here to present language logically and in a consistent, rule-based manner.  That is not easy in the case of collocations, but it is an achievable target.

While Orwell's first rule of language use is suitable and valuable advice for native-speaker writers in English to avoid the use of cliché and worn-out metaphor, it is probably of less utility for learners of the language at anything except the highest levels. In fact, well-worn and familiar clichés such as      the calm before the storm     the darkest hour     in the nick of time     frightened / scared to death     read between the lines     the writing on the wall and hundreds more are lexical chunks well worth learning unless one's ambition is to be an original writer in the language. These are strongly collocating and predictable combinations that have great utility for learners although they may be disparaged as clichés by the cognoscenti.

(Incidentally, the six rules in full are:

• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

and are routinely ignored, including on this site.)

If you are a native or near-native speaker of English, there will be a temptation to concede that almost all combinations of words are possible collocations and, therefore, acceptable.  This is a temptation worth resisting because learners are not generally very interested in the quirky and unlikely but possible and a good deal more concerned with sounding natural.  So, for example, although you may be able to think of a time when it is possible to produce     Undertake my homework your learners will be a good deal more concerned to be able to say     Do my homework     Hand in my homework     She set homework etc. Not being clear about what is and is not permissible is unhelpful even if that means editing or being economical with the truth.

The following is taken from the simpler guide to this area in the initial-plus training section.  If you have been there, you've done it.

Collocations are very helpful for learning vocabulary.  There are some things to consider:

Here are some examples of exercise types you could use in collocation teaching

Odd-one out:

Word grids.   Students work with dictionaries and/or a text to put a X in the right boxes:

Matchers.  Students draw the lines and end up with something like this:

Gap fills.   Students work together to see what can naturally go in the gaps:

We …………… the …………… path up the mountain until we …………… the summit. The view was quite …………… and we …………… for over an hour just …………… it.

Selections.  Students choose the right collocations:

The tasteless / foul / bright hotel was in a dirty / unclean / polluted alley. The receptionist was so abusive / cruel / spiteful that we felt undesirable / unwelcome / objectionable from the outset.

References: Lewis, M., 2008, Implementing the Lexical Approach , Boston: Heinle Cengage Learning Macis, M and Schmitt, N, 2017, The figurative and polysemous nature of collocations and their place in ELT , ELT Journal Volume 71/1 pp50-59, Oxford: Oxford University Press McGee, ID, 2006, Lexical Intuitions and Collocation Patterns in Corpora , PhD thesis, Centre for Language and Communication Research, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University Orwell, G, 1946, Politics and the English Language , London: Horizon Schmitt, N, 2000, Vocabulary in Language Teaching , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Xiao, R & McEnery, T, 2006, Collocation, Semantic Prosody, and Near Synonymy: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective , Applied Linguistics 27/1 pp103–129, Oxford: Oxford University Press

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Advertisements Advertisements use for the fastest search of WordReference. © 2024 WordReference.com any problems. < Previous Home > College of Arts and Sciences > Psychology > PSYCH_DISS > 279 Psychology Dissertations Collocation production and language use in english-spanish bilinguals. Stephanie Diaz Follow Date of Award Degree type. Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) First Advisor Lee Branum Martin Second Advisor Gabriel Kuperminc Third Advisor Rose Sevcik Fourth Advisor Julie Washington Formulaic language provides processing advantages and is essential for using language fluently in both native and non-native speakers. Collocations are the most studied subcategory of formulaic language besides idiomatic expressions. Collocations are two or more words that co-occur in a language. Exposure to linguistic input has been one of the main contributing factors in language acquisition. Therefore, researchers have stated that providing language exposure opportunities can enhance people's comprehension and productive use of that language. However, the relation between collocation production and language engagement has yet to be adequately tested through item-level analysis of their constructs. Therefore, this dissertation has three goals. The first goal is to examine the structure of language engagement in English-Spanish bilingual college students. The second goal is to examine the structure of English collocation production. The third goal is to examine the relationship between the components of language engagement and English collocation production. In a secondary analysis of 212 English-Spanish bilingual college students (18-30), I used their responses on an English collocation cloze task and language engagement questions on the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire to indicate these constructs. The findings suggest that language exposure activities may be specific to English and Spanish. However, performance on collocation items did not support reasonably parsimonious factor structures. Further analysis is needed to better understand the linguistic abilities which may explain English collocation production. https://doi.org/10.57709/35868302 Recommended Citation Diaz, Stephanie, "Collocation Production and Language Use in English-Spanish Bilinguals." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2023. doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/35868302 File Upload Confirmation Available for download on Thursday, July 24, 2025 Since July 25, 2023 Advanced Search Notify me via email or RSS Collections Disciplines Submit ETD (Thesis/Dissertation) Home | About | FAQ | My Account | Accessibility Statement Privacy Copyright Collocation: Theoretical Considerations, Methods and Techniques for Teaching It September 2015 Conference: The Second International Language and Language Teaching Conference At: Yogyakarta, Indonesia Volume: Proceedings of the 2nd International Language and Language Teaching Conference Politeknik Negeri Bandung Discover the world's research 25+ million members 160+ million publication pages 2.3+ billion citations Chengyu Liu Assist Abdul-Nafi ' Khihdhir Recruit researchers Join for free Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation Improved collocation methods to optimize low-thrust, low-energy transfers in the earth-moon system public deposited. Modern and near-future Solar Electric Propulsion capabilities enable many new missions that were inconceivable using chemical propulsion systems. Many of these involve highly complex trajectories that are very challenging to design. New tools are needed that effectively utilize the rapidly growing parallel processing capabilities of modern computers. This research improves Gauss-Lobatto collocation methods, which are known to perform very well for low-thrust trajectory optimization, by formulating them as massively parallel processes. The parallelized elements of the problem formulation execute up to 11 times faster, depending on what force model is used and when evaluated by themselves. When accounting for the operations of the nonlinear programming solver, this translates to up to 3.7 times faster performance for solving a complete trajectory optimization problem, again depending on the force model that is used. The remaining barriers to further performance improvements, and the conditions upon which these depend, are clearly identified. The implemented methods are combined into an optimization tool named Maverick. More general improvements to the formulation of the Gauss-Lobatto collocation methods are also developed and included in Maverick, which permit a more flexible use of these optimization schemes and enable them to find more complex solutions. One example of this is Maverick's ability to autonomously introduce gravity assists into trajectories, which greatly increases the utility and convergence radius of these methods. In order to demonstrate the benefit of this work, three applications are studied. The first are transfers between halo-like orbits in the Earth-Moon system, which shows this is likely an unattractive region for missions like the New Worlds Observer. The second application investigates stabilization maneuvers in lunar distant retrograde orbits. This work demonstrates the feasibility of these stabilization transfers for a variety of sample return missions, such as the upcoming Asteroid Redirect Mission. The final application discussed is a series of multi-body low-thrust transfers from the Earth to the Moon that efficiently utilize highly variable dynamics to reduce propellant consumption, which is relevant for a variety of future mission concepts. These are computed for a wide range of flight times, showing that reductions up to 45% of the transfer time can be achieved with a propellant consumption as little as 0.5% of the total spacecraft mass. Up to 90% of the flight time can be eliminated for a propellant cost of 4% of the total spacecraft mass, or up to 83% for a propellant cost of less than 2%. The developed algorithm seamlessly transitions its solutions from full low-thrust, low-energy trajectories to the `pure' low-thrust trajectories that define the shortest transfer trajectories, validating its robust performance. Beyond these quanti_able results, these examples illustrate the complexity of the solutions that can be identified with these improved implementations of Gauss-Lobatto collocation methods, with many instances where the optimization method autonomously introduces powered gravity assists, an unusual capability that has the potential for useful application to many other trajectory optimization problems. Herman, Jonathan F.C. Aerospace Engineering Sciences Parker, Jeffrey S. McMahon, Jay Born, George Jones, Brandon A. Fornberg, Bengt University of Colorado Boulder Astrodynamics Parallel computing Electric Propulsion Trajectory Optimization Low-Thrust Propulsion Dissertation In Copyright English [eng] Relationships Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions 2019-11-14 Public ' $('.canonical-image').after(template) $('.canonical-image').remove() } Architecture and Design Asian and Pacific Studies Business and Economics Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies Computer Sciences Cultural Studies Engineering General Interest Geosciences Industrial Chemistry Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Jewish Studies Library and Information Science, Book Studies Life Sciences Linguistics and Semiotics Literary Studies Materials Sciences Mathematics Social Sciences Sports and Recreation Theology and Religion Publish your article The role of authors Promoting your article Abstracting & indexing Publishing Ethics Why publish with De Gruyter How to publish with De Gruyter Our book series Our subject areas Your digital product at De Gruyter Contribute to our reference works Product information Tools & resources Product Information Promotional Materials Orders and Inquiries FAQ for Library Suppliers and Book Sellers Repository Policy Free access policy Open Access agreements Database portals For Authors Customer service People + Culture Journal Management How to join us Working at De Gruyter Mission & Vision De Gruyter Foundation De Gruyter Ebound Our Responsibility Partner publishers Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view. Effectiveness of second language collocation instruction: a meta-analysis This study reports a meta-analysis of studies that investigated the effectiveness of instruction on second language collocation learning. A total of 64 research projects in 17 primary studies (the number of participants = 3,859) were included in the meta-analysis. Aggregated results confirmed the effectiveness of collocation instruction for facilitating second language collocation learning ( d  = 1.415, 95% CI: 1.189, 1.641). The results of moderator analysis indicated that the intervention method was a significant predictor of intervention effectiveness. To be specific, 1) explicit interventions produced larger effect sizes than implicit interventions; 2) interventions with low session frequency did not produce larger effect sizes than those with high session frequency; 3) long interventions did not show larger effect sizes than short interventions; and 4) constrained-constructed responses, selected responses, and multiple outcome measures did not produce larger effect sizes than free-constructed responses. The study also offered explanations for the results, as well as implications for the teaching and research of collocations. Funding source: Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) Award Identifier / Grant number: G1323521078 Research funding: This work is supported by Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) (NO. G1323521078) and the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (NO. 21YJC740085). Detailed information of the sample studies. Primary studies Learner characteristics Design characteristics L1 L2 S C O SF D(t) Study 1 28 P En H Imp FL CR 1 3 Study 2 28 P En H Imp FL CR 1 3 Study 3 28 P En H Imp FL CR 1 3 Study 4 28 P En H Imp FL CR 1 3 Study 5 28 P En H Imp FL CR 1 3 Study 6 28 P En H Imp FL CR 1 3 Study 7 28 P En H Imp FL SR 1 3 Study 8 28 P En H Imp FL SR 1 3 Study 1 30 P En H Exp FL CR 1 3 Study 2 30 P En H Exp FL CR 1 3 Study 3 30 P En H Imp FL CR 1 3 Study 4 30 P En H Exp FL SR 1 3 Study 5 30 P En H Imp FL SR 1 3 Study 1 84 J En U Imp FL SR 1 0.143 Study 2 84 J En U Exp FL SR 1 0.143 Study 1 58 C En U Imp FL MO 2 3 Study 2 61 C En U Imp FL MO 2 3 Study 3 59 C En U Imp FL MO 2 3 Study 4 58 C En U Imp FL CR 2 3 Study 5 61 C En U Imp FL CR 2 3 Study 6 61 C En U Imp FL CR 2 3 Study 1 62 M En U Imp SL CR 3 0.286 Study 2 62 M En U Imp SL SR 3 0.286 Study 3 62 M En U Imp SL CR 3 0.286 Study 4 62 M En U Imp SL SR 3 0.286 Study 5 62 M En U Imp SL CR 3 0.286 Study 6 62 M En U Imp SL SR 3 0.286 Study 7 52 C En U Imp FL CR 2 0.286 Study 8 51 C En U Imp FL CR 2 0.286 Study 9 52 C En U Imp FL CR 2 0.286 Study 10 51 C En U Imp FL CR 2 0.286 Study 1 50 C En U Exp FL CR 1 0.143 Study 2 44 C En U Exp FL SR 1 0.143 Study 3 50 C En U Exp FL SR 1 0.143 Study 4 44 C En U Exp FL CR 1 0.143 Study 5 50 C En U Exp FL CR 1 0.143 96 Eg En U Exp FL SR 1 6 Study 1 30 Ir En L Exp FL FR 3 4 Study 2 30 Ir En L Imp FL FR 3 4 Study 1 95 M En U Imp FL SR 1 4 Study 2 86 M En U Imp FL SR 1 4 Study 3 95 M En U Imp FL CR 1 4 Study 4 86 M En U Imp FL CR 1 4 Study 5 95 M En U Imp FL SR 1 4 Study 6 86 M En U Imp FL SR 1 4 Study 7 95 M En U Imp FL CR 1 4 Study 8 86 M En U Imp FL CR 1 4 Study 1 65 A En U Exp FL CR 1 6 Study 2 64 A En U Exp FL CR 1 6 Study 3 64 A En U Exp FL CR 1 6 Study 4 65 A En U Exp FL CR 1 6 Study 5 64 A En U Exp FL CR 1 6 Study 6 64 A En U Exp FL CR 1 6 40 Ir En L Imp FL SR N/A N/A Study 1 64 Ir En L Exp FL SR N/A N/A Study 2 64 Ir En U Imp FL SR N/A N/A Study 1 71 A En U Exp FL SR 1 4 Study 2 78 A En U Imp FL SR 1 4 Study 3 71 A En U Exp FL CR 1 4 Study 4 78 A En U Imp FL CR 1 4 55 C En U Imp FL MO 1 0.143 60 Ir En L Exp FL FR 2.63 5.714 Study 1 40 Eg En U Imp FL SR 1 10 Study 2 40 Eg En U Imp FL CR 1 10 Study 3 40 Eg En U Exp FL SR 1 10 Study 4 40 Eg En U Exp FL CR 1 10 64 Ir En L Imp FL MO N/A N/A 67 In En U Exp SL MO 2 12 a N , sample size; b A, Arabic; C, Chinese; Eg, Egyptian; Ir, Iranian; In, Indian; J, Japanese; M, Mixed; P, Polish; c En, English; d S, institutional status; U, universities; H, high schools; L, language institutes; e M, intervention methods; Exp, explicit interventions; Imp, implicit interventions; f C, contexts; g O, outcome measures; CR, constrained-constructed responses; FR, free-constructed responses; SR, selected responses; MO, multiple outcome measures; h SF, session frequency; i D (t), total intervention duration (weeks); N/A, not reported. 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Journal and Issue Articles in the same issue. 416 IMAGES Collocation: 2500+ Collocations List From A-Z With Examples Collocation patterns, examples and percentage Collocation: 2500+ Collocations List From A-Z With Examples 50+ Common Collocations with TAKE with Useful Examples Collocation: 2500+ Collocations List From A-Z With Examples Collocation: 2500+ Collocations List From A-Z With Examples VIDEO collocation #Education #Peopleandblog #Collocation #Linguistic Preposition collocation and 'used to' #grammar #english #communicationskills #learningenglish teacher major collocation #English Collocation. #english #learning #collocation #englishlanguage #education Common Collocation with Do #english #learning #learnenglish #memory #vocabulary Collocation with Catch#Spoken English #english language #communication#ielts English#english mastery COMMENTS Transform Your Academic English Skills With These 50 Collocations Check your sentence against the example sentence for each collocation. 1. Accurate assessment - correct and precise evaluation of something or someone. E.g. "Accurate assessment of head motion can be a useful tool in clinical studies". 2. Address the issue - consider or deal with the matter at hand. E.g. Academic Collocation List The Academic Collocation List (ACL) is a list containing 2,469 of the most frequent and useful collocations which occur in written academic English. It can be seen as a collocational companion to the Academic Word List (AWL), consisting of collocations (or word combinations) rather than single words. The ACL was developed by Kirsten Ackermann and Yu-Hua Chen using the Pearson International ... PDF English Collocations in Use Advanced stronger. inclement weather. resque. weaker. broad hint broad accent broad smile. DTypes of collocations in this bookThe collocations in this book are a. l frequently use. in modern English. We used a corpus(a. database of language) to check this. We have also selected the collocations which will be. ColloCaid Find the words you need. The ColloCaid project investigates user needs, the visualisation of lexicographic data and human-computer interaction in the development of a tool to help writers with collocations, i.e., words that are conventionally used together such as 'collect data', 'change dramatically', 'successfully achieved', 'entirely ... How To Write A Dissertation Or Thesis Craft a convincing dissertation or thesis research proposal. Write a clear, compelling introduction chapter. Undertake a thorough review of the existing research and write up a literature review. Undertake your own research. Present and interpret your findings. Draw a conclusion and discuss the implications. PDF Developing an Academic Collocation List for Arts and ... dissertation, therefore, aims to demonstrate the need for an empirically-derived discipline-specific list of academic collocations for EAP, moreover ESAP, and then presents and evaluates such a list - the Academic Collocation List for Arts and Humanities (ACLAH). The Online OXFORD Collocation Dictionary of English Online Collocation Dictionary. A completely new type of dictionary with word collocation that helps students and advanced learners effectively study, write and speak natural-sounding English. This online dictionary is very helpful for the education of the IELTS, TOEFL test. Level: Upper-Intermediate to Advanced. Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Collocation' This dissertation introduces a new type of segmentation - collocation segmentation - and a new method to perform it, and applies them to three different text processing tasks. In lexicography, collocation segmentation makes possible the use of large corpora to evaluate the usage and importance of terminology over time. Theoretical Framework: Collocation in Systemic Functional ... 3.1 Introduction. As we have mentioned in the above chapters, the theoretical framework of this dissertation is Systemic Functional Grammar. This chapter is particularly devoted to the modeling of collocation in Systemic Functional Grammar. This is an ambitious undertaking, in at least two respects. First, as Martin (1992: 271) points out ... Understanding collocations: why they're important Understanding collocation allows learners to become more confident about their ability as they pave the way to how English is really spoken and written. This two-part blog series presents two resources which help teach collocations in class, as well as provide your students with tools to study collocations independently, thereby taking charge ... PDF ColloCaid: a tool to help academic English writers find the words ... Keywords: collocation, EAP, writing, e-lexicography. 1. Introduction Research has shown that less experienced users of academic English have a limited repertoire of collocations (Frankenberg-Garcia, 2018). Indeed, collocations like REACH+conclusion are among the most frequent look-ups among novice users of written academic English (Yoon, 2016). Collins Collocations dictionary Drag the correct answer into the box. judo. canoeing. hockey. skiing. Your score: New from Collins. Trusted free online Collocations dictionary from Collins. Authoritative, reliable and up-to-date content for English word reference, with images, example sentences, audio and video pronunciations, and related thesaurus. Collocation Collocation is a syntagmatic phenomenon insofar as it concerns which sorts of items are more or less likely to co-occur horizontally in a clause. For example, it is more likely that the verb select will co-occur with an animate subject so we will not usually encounter: The tree selected. The car selected. Collocation Collocation refers to words that are found together in language. Collocations can be fixed, where it is difficult to replace one of the words with an alternative, or freer, allowing for more choice of words. Example. 'Utter disaster' is a fixed collocation, as there are few words that can be used instead of 'disaster'. thesis thesis. ⓘ. n. write a [college, senior, doctoral, graduation] thesis. a thesis on [women's rights, astrophysics] the [graduate's, student's, candidate's] thesis. defended her thesis on [women's rights] thesis or dissertation. still trying to finish my thesis. Collocation Production and Language Use in English-Spanish Bilinguals Collocations are the most studied subcategory of formulaic language besides idiomatic expressions. Collocations are two or more words that co-occur in a language. ... Therefore, this dissertation has three goals. The first goal is to examine the structure of language engagement in English-Spanish bilingual college students. The second goal is ... Collocation: Theoretical Considerations, Methods and Techniques for The practical issue of teaching collocation has been neglected by much previous research. This literature study attempts to adress the issue by discussing theoretical considerations, methods and ... Collocations With "DISSERTATION" in English What is a collocation? A collocation is two or more words that often go together. These combinations (for example collocations with "DISSERTATION") just sound "right" to native English speakers, who use them all the time.On the other hand, other combinations of "DISSERTATION" may be unnatural and just sound "wrong".. Using collocations list of "DISSERTATION" improves your ... An Analysis of Collocations Used in Written Assignment An Analysis of Collocations Used in Written Assignment - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. This document is a thesis submitted by Rizkina Putri to the Department of English Language Education at UIN Ar-Raniry in Banda Aceh, Indonesia in 2018. The thesis analyzes the types of collocation mistakes commonly made by students in their written assignments. PDF The Effect of Lexical Collocation Awareness-Raising on EFL Students Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in Candidacy for the ... collocation awareness-raising makes first year students of English sound natural and proficient. Data for the study were collected from 50 first year students at the department of English, university of ... Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation This research improves Gauss-Lobatto collocation methods, which are known to perform very well for low-thrust trajectory optimization, by formulating them as massively parallel processes. The parallelized elements of the problem formulation execute up to 11 times faster, depending on what force model is used and when evaluated by themselves. Effectiveness of second language collocation instruction: a meta-analysis This study reports a meta-analysis of studies that investigated the effectiveness of instruction on second language collocation learning. A total of 64 research projects in 17 primary studies (the number of participants = 3,859) were included in the meta-analysis. Aggregated results confirmed the effectiveness of collocation instruction for facilitating second language collocation learning ( d ... assignment essay homework phd report resume review speech thesis