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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 23:1 (2018) ► pp.85–113

Collocation and word association

Comparing collocation measuring methods

| Korea University

This paper studies the relationship between grammar and language use by comparing word association and collocation. Since word association reveals mental semantic knowledge, usage-based approaches expect word association to mirror the relation between words in use, namely collocation. The paragraph is a more apt unit for collocation than the sentence in mirroring word association. Among measures of collocation, (simple) log likelihood and t-score turn out to be more consistent with association, with log likelihood leading by a small margin over MI or MI3. Overall, word association and collocation are quite close, but not perfectly close because of differences in relevant resources and the characteristics of lexical/semantic relations.

Keywords: word association, collocation, rank measure, semantic relations, language use
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Collocation and word association
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Collocation in paragraphs and sentences
  • 5.Parts of speech and collocation
  • 6.Frequency of words and collocation
  • 7.Lexical and semantic relations in word association and collocation
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 31 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.15116.kan
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