Collocational range and collocational markedness

He or she can reinforce the patterns of collocation which already exist in the language by adhering to them:

"Herman J. Mankiewicz had been a fine screenwriter . . . , a 'compulsive gambler', a famous drunk, a slashing wit, and a man who was almost ferociously accident prone."

The following example of marked collocation is from John Le Carré's 'The Russia House':

"Some tout at the book fair wanted me to take UK rights in a book on 'glasnost' and the crisis of peace. Essays by past and present hawks, reappraisals of strategy. Could real 'peace break out' after all?"

It typically occurs with 'shoulders' and does not have a particularly strong link with any other word in the language.

'Run', by contrast, has a vast collocational range, some of its typical collocates being 'company', 'business', 'show', 'car', 'stockings', 'tights', 'nose', 'wild', 'debt', 'bill', 'river', 'course', 'water', and 'colour', among others.

Patterns of collocation which have a history of recurrence in the language become part of our standard linguistic repertoire and we do not stop to think about them when we encounter them in text.

By contrast, collocations which have little or no history of recurrence catch our attention and strike us as unusual.

For example, in its sense of 'manage', the verb 'run' collocates with words like 'company', 'institution', and 'business'.

In its sense of 'operate or provide', it collocates with words like 'service' and 'course'.

(2) The second factor which determines the collocational range of an item is the number of senses it has.

Most words have several senses and they tend to attract a different set of collocates for each sense.

This means that there is no such thing as an impossible collocation.

New and unusual combinations of words occur frequently and we do not necessarily dismiss them as unacceptable.

As well as being reinforced, the established patterns in a language can therefore be used as a backdrop against which new images and new meanings can be invoked.

New collocations often catch on, are reinforced by usage, and eventually become part of the standard repertoire of the language.

The verb 'bury' is likely to have a much broader collocational range than any of its hyponyms, such as 'inter' or 'entomb', for example.

Only 'people' can be 'interred', but you can 'bury people', a 'treasure', your 'head', 'face', 'feelings', and 'memories'.

Every word in a language can be said to have a range of items with which it is compatible, to a greater or lesser degree.

Range here refers to the set of collocates, that is other words, which are typically associated with the word in question.

Some words have a much broader collocational range than others.

The English verb 'shrug', for instance, has a rather limited collocational range.

'War' normally 'breaks out', but 'peace prevails'.

These unmarked collocations suggest that war is a temporary and undesirable situation and that peace is a normal and desirable one.

The reason for this is that collocational ranges are not fixed.

Words attract new collocates all the time; they do so naturally, through processes of analogy, or because speakers create unusual collocations on purpose.

This kind of natural extension of a range is far less striking than marked collocations which involve deliberate confusion of collocational ranges to create new images -

a marked collocation being an unusual combination of words, one that challenges our expectations as hearers or readers.

Marked collocations are often used in fiction, poetry, humour, and advertisements precisely for this reason:

because they can create unusual images, produce laughter and catch the reader's attention.

It is, of course, perfectly reasonable to argue that the opposite is also true,

that it is the collocational patterning of a word that determines its different senses.

"I first met Hugh Fraser in 1977. Charming, rather hesitant, a heavy smoker and heavy gambler, he had made such headway through his fortune that he had decided to sell his last major asset,

the controlling shares in the business which his father had built up and named Scottish and Universal Investments."

The difference between 'compulsive gambler' and 'heavy gambler' is that

the first is a common collocation in English, whereas the second represents an attempt to extend the range of 'heavy' to include 'heavy gambler', by analogy with 'heavy smoker' and 'heavy drinker'.

(1) The first is its level of specificity:

the more general a word is, the broader its collocational range; the more specific it is, the more restricted its collocational range.

It will be obvious from our discussion of collocation so far that,

unlike grammatical statements, statements about collocation are made in terms of what is typical or untypical rather than what is admissible or inadmissible.

To sum up,

we create new collocations all the time, either by extending an existing range or by deliberately putting together words from different or opposing ranges.