All aspects of the concept of collocation - the phenomenon whereby words naturally tend to occur in the company of a restricted set of other words - are covered in this book. It deals in detail with the history of the word collocation, the concepts associated with it and its use in a linguistic context. The authors show the practical means by which the collocational behaviour of words can be explored using illustrative computer programs and examine applications in teaching, lexicography and natural language processing that use collocation in formation. The book investigates the place that collocation occupies in theories of language and provides a thoroughly comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the current position of collocation in language studies and applied linguistics.
GEOFF BARNBROOK is Senior Lecturer in English Language, University of Birmingham, UK. His main research interests are in contemporary and historical applications of corpus linguistics and lexicography, and his publications include Language and Computers: A Practical Introduction to the Computer Analysis of Language and Defining Language: A local grammar of definition sentences.
OLIVER MASON is Lecturer in English Language, University of Birmingham, UK. Oliver is a computational linguist and has developed software for accessing and processing corpus data. He works mainly at the interface of phraseology/syntax with text and discourse.
RAMESH KRISHNAMURTHY is Visiting Academic Fellow in the School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University, UK. Ramesh worked on the COBUILD project at Birmingham University as a lexicographer and editor, and developed the Bank of English corpus. He has taught at Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Aston universities in the UK and has contributed to several research projects. Ramesh co-edited six volumes of Corpus Linguistics and edited English Collocation Studies: The OSTI Report.