The figurative and polysemous nature of collocations and their place in ELT (original) (raw)
There is little guidance on how to teach different meaning senses of collocations as most pedagogical materials treat collocations as word partners which co-occur together. However, if we consider meaning, collocations fall into three categories. Literal collocations are combinations where the literal meanings of the words are simply added together. Figurative collocations have idiomatic meanings which are not derivable from the component words. Duplex collocations are polysemous, having both literal and figurative meanings. This exploratory study analysed 54 collocations and found that even though the majority of the collocations appeared to be literal, a substantial percentage had both literal and figurative meanings, and relatively few seemed to be solely figurative. We discuss the teaching implications of this, depending on whether the most important collocational characteristic is a pattern of co-occurrence or of meaning. Overall, we argue that considering meaning can bring useful insights into the nature of collocations and how to teach them.170) early definition, 'Collocation is the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other in a text', which is reflected in typical descriptions of collocation in recent textbooks: • 'Collocation means a natural combination of words; it refers to the way English words are closely associated with each other'. English Collocations in Use: Intermediate (McCarthy and O'Dell 2005: 4). • 'It is important to know which words collocate (commonly go together)'.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.