Delahunty and Garvey
bird.” This negative definition suggests that the typical bird is not flightless;
similarly, WNWD describes dodoes (p. 414) as having “rudimentary wings
useless for flying” and ostriches (p. 1007) as “having small, useless wings.”
Presumably prototypical wings are not useless for flying.
Book and mental dictionaries differ also in the amount of information
they provide about the collocational properties of words. For example, if
we leave fat, bacon, butter, or oil sitting around long enough it will become
rancid, e.g., rancid bacon; however, if we leave fruit, vegetables, or eggs sit-
ting, they will become rotten, e.g., rotten apple. So rancid collocates with the
words for fatty or oily substances, and rotten collocates with words for fruits,
vegetables, and the like.
One word collocates with another if they occur together in phrases
more frequently than their meanings alone would predict. For example,
green collocates with envy, as in green with envy, far more frequently than
other color names, for example blue. Likewise, blue collocates with face,
as in blue in the face, far more frequently than other color names (except
perhaps for red, as in red in the face). So, collocations are relatively predict-
able co-occurrences of words in phrases. Mental dictionaries include far
richer collocational information than book dictionaries do.
The interpretation of a word may depend on what it collocates with. So
dirty means “unfair” when it collocates with fight, but “soiled” when it col-
locates with clothes, and is ambiguous with hands.
Exercise
- What words collocate with sweet? How does the meaning of sweet
change as its collocates change? - Think of three other words besides dirty and sweet and their collo-
cates, and describe how your words change meaning as their collocates
change.
We can look at collocation as largely a matter of field. When the poly-
semous word morphology collocates with words like derivational and inflec-
tional, then we know we are in the field of linguistics and that it is to be
interpreted as denoting word-structure. Until recently linguists paid rela-
tively little attention to collocation. But with the development of very large
computerized databases of spoken and written language (corpora) and the
programs to search them (concordancers), we can expect collocation to be-