ABSTRACT

One goal of applied linguistics is to improve the decisions made by dictionary writers and syllabus designers when systematically presenting English vocabulary to users or learners of the language. The area of English vocabulary most studied by applied linguists over the past 25 years has been collocation. Depending on the theoretical approach adopted, collocation is a semantic, textual, or statistical property (Partington 1998) which involves words being used together more frequently than might otherwise be expected, or being used together very rarely. In the research literature which is relevant to collocation there is little agreement as to exactly how and why this ‘togetherness’ is motivated or restricted. This is principally because much of this literature has been produced as a result of work in other areas such as lexicography and dictionary design (Sinclair 1991; Moon 2007), English language teaching (Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992; Lewis 2000; Willis 2003), and language acquisition (Pawley and Syder 1983; Wray 2002).