COLLOCATIONS FROM FUNDAMENTAL LINGUISTIC RESEARCH TO TEACHING METHODOLOGY

Abstract

The present article arms to review the most relevant approaches to the study of collocations with the purpose of enhancing the teaching of vocabulary, collocations and idiomatic expressions in a Japanese language class. The study of collocations has developed in recent years with cross-language comparisons across a large spectrum of linguistic families, and the ways of defining collocations have also become richer and more nuanced. As language teachers become more aware that enhancing vocabulary knowledge is key for both reading comprehension and smooth self-expression, the importance of teaching collocations was also recognized. Quantitative and qualitative studies based on students' tests, and English essays, in the case offoreign kamers from various cultures of English as L2, as well as studies performed on the kamers ofvarious non-European languages have shown that collocations are important from the very beginning of language leaming and should be incorporated in the instruction and testing of the respective languages. On the other hand, Japanese scholars define collocations in a broader sense, by contrast withfixed expressions like proverbs, as being flexible combinations of more than two words, which can be conjugated or modified freely, and consider them suitable for intermediate or advanced kamers to improve their spoken language ability. However, we shall argue that by focusing on verb collocations first we can introducé from the very beginning the collocations of important and multivalent verbs like kakeru, kakaru, ireru, deru, etc.

Headnote

ABSTRACT: The present article arms to review the most relevant approaches to the study of collocations with the purpose of enhancing the teaching of vocabulary, collocations and idiomatic expressions in a Japanese language class. The study of collocations has developed in recent years with cross-language comparisons across a large spectrum of linguistic families, and the ways of defining collocations have also become richer and more nuanced. As language teachers become more aware that enhancing vocabulary knowledge is key for both reading comprehension and smooth self-expression, the importance of teaching collocations was also recognized. Quantitative and qualitative studies based on students' tests, and English essays, in the case offoreign kamers from various cultures of English as L2, as well as studies performed on the kamers ofvarious non-European languages have shown that collocations are important from the very beginning of language leaming and should be incorporated in the instruction and testing of the respective languages.

On the other hand, Japanese scholars define collocations in a broader sense, by contrast withfixed expressions like proverbs, as being flexible combinations of more than two words, which can be conjugated or modified freely, and consider them suitable for intermediate or advanced kamers to improve their spoken language ability. However, we shall argue that by focusing on verb collocations first we can introducé from the very beginning the collocations of important and multivalent verbs like kakeru, kakaru, ireru, deru, etc.

KEYWORDS: collocations, Japanese language, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics

INTRODUCTION

Since medieval times, Biblical scholars made lists of words and concordances in order to show that various parts of the Bible were factually consistent. The fact that certain words co-occur frequently was pointed out by the 18-th century bookseller and scholar Alexander Cruden who produced in 1736 the Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testaments, a monumental work of scholarship. In twentieth-century linguistics, the fact that some words co-occur more frequently than the necessities of syntax or grammar would require was referred to as collocation. J. R. Firth, who famously "defined" collocations as "actual words in habitual company"1, considered collocations as abstraction at a syntagmatic level and implied that they required a quantitative basis, measuring the frequency of co-occurrences in a given text2. Firth distinguished two types of collocations, the "habitual collocations", whose terms are strictly bound together, such as 'March hare' and collocations whose components are less restricted, like Tight' which can collocate with many other words3.

Another approach to collocations was the phraseological one, originating in the Soviet linguistic school, where scholars such as Vinogradov 4 , Amosova 5 , and Mel'cuk 6 attempted to create a comprehensive framework of formulaic sequences. These scholars differentiated between idiomatic phrases, which have opaque meanings not deducible from their components, and 'word-like units', or restricted collocations, where the meaning of the terms depends on their relation, and has a syntactic function7.

This phraseological approach was further developed by the British linguist A. P. Cowie, who identified "four types of combinations in a phraseological continutim:

- Free combinations (e.g., 'drink tea'): The items can be freely replaced based on their semantics and are used in their literal sense.

- Restricted collocations (e.g., 'perform a task'): Substitutions are allowed but limited. At least one element has a non-literal meaning, and at least one has a literal meaning. Commutability is restricted due to the specialization of one term. The combination is transparent.

- Figurative idioms (e.g., 'do a U-turn'): Substitution is rare; the combination has a figurative meaning, but a literal interpretation is possible, such as 'do a U-turn', which refers to a driving manoeuvre and can also be used metaphorically.

- Pure idioms (e.g., 'blow the gaff): No substitution is allowed; the combination has a figurative meaning with no possibility of a literal interpretation, as its meaning is not compositional."8

A recent definition of collocations produced by Stefan Evert as "a word combination whose semantic and/or syntactic properties cannot be fully predicted from those of its components, and which therefore has to be listed in a lexicon"9, seems to be the most balanced one, being also based on a frequency approach.

Thus, the research of all these lexical combinations pointed out the pervasive nature of phraseology in language. The capacity to produce formulaic language, or to use idiomatic expressions means fluency in language, and is the ultimate goal of all learners of foreign languages. A. Pawley and F. H. Syder10 tried to determine what makes fluency in language and came with the term 'puzzle of native-hke selection' for the specific ability to choose the most natural phrases from all the possible grammatical expressions of an idea. If naturalness is largely a matter of grammatical simplicity and brevity - native speakers prefer the shortest forms, it is not limited only to that11.

Investigating what makes up nativelike fluency in communication the authors observed that native speakers have an additional knowledge beside the ability to form grammatical sentences. They possess elements of linguistic knowledge such as 'memorized sentences' and Texicalized sentence sterns'. Some clauses they produce are "entirely familiar, memorized sequences. These are strings which the speaker or hearer is capable of consciously assembling or analyzing, but which on most occasions of use are recalled as wholes .... The number of memorized complete clauses and sentences known to the mature English speaker is probably many thousands."12

However, some of these memorized chunks of speech are also lexicalized - when their meaning is not totally predictable from their form, and when they also represent a social institution (a conventional label for a conventional concept). As an example, the authors give Tong house' which is a lexicalized expression when it refers to a communal d dwelling built by the Dayaks of Borneo13. This type of collocations were called lexicalized sentence sterns. Pawley and Syder consider them, together with other memorized strings of words, as the building blocks of fluency, of "fluent connected speech"14.

DIDACTIC APPROACHES TO COLLOCATIONS

So far, we have examined a few theoretical linguistic approaches to collocations and the way in which the concept has evolved. From the above-mentioned research it becomes clear that collocations have a crucial role in learning a foreign language and in enhancing comprehension of texts as well as fluency. Much of the recent research concentrates on the quantitative importance of collocations, their pervasiveness in language, in the context of teaching English as a foreign language basically everywhere in the world, for academie and professional purposes as well as simply conversational ones. Thus, English linguists' studies have reached conclusions such as: "[n]o piece of natural spoken or written English is totally free of collocation" , and "collocation permeates even the most basic, frequent words", "up to 70% of everything we say, hear, read, or write is to be found in some form of fixed expression", "the number of collocations of the first 200 most frequent pivot words account for approximately 68% of all the collocations in spoken English, and that 77% of the total spoken collocations comprise two words."15 Askari also notes that "collocation has now become an accepted aspect of vocabulary description, acquisition, pedagogy, and assessment, as is evident in the plethora of publicatie"ns on the topic over the past few decades"16.

Corpus research facilitates the study of collocations as well as the assessment of learners' performance through quantitative and qualitative methods. N. T. Trang17 examined English-major students' use of different lexical collocation types, and their errors in essay writing and described their difficulties in using these lexical collocations. He also made an overview of recent research on collocational errors made by native students of various languages (Chinese, Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, etc.) when learning English. The differences between students' native language and English give rise to various difficulties in learning and using collocations correctly. The conclusion of all these studies is that it is necessary to raise students' awareness of less popular types of lexical collocations. Secondly, it is essential to provide students with more practice activities to overcome the influence of the native language on their English usage. Another conclusion of many studies is that teaching new words in chunks rather than isolated words helps students to be well aware of lexical collocations and makes them easier to remember18.

In the modern learners' quest for attaining authenticity and nativelike fluency in the foreign language it is absolutely necessary to introducé the study of all sorts of idiomatic expressions since they are essential in native speakers' discourse. Idioms, those "intricate combinations of words whose meaning eludes straightforward interpretation"19 are found in all types of discourses. In a recent study researchers analyzed the dialogues in the script of the movie Elemental - Forces of Nature and found 41 idiomatic expressions: 2 proverbs, 4 clichés, 4 similes, and 33 fixed statements. To give a few examples:

COLLOCATIONS IN JAPANESE LANGUAGE TEACHING

Comparing the above-mentioned research into teaching English language collocations with the way in which Japanese is taught we can notice that recently Japanese language specialists have come to acknowledge the importance of collocations and idioms in language teaching, as well as the necessity to use as many real language situations as possible through what they call nama-kyözai, real life teaching materials (use of cooking recipes, advertisements, movies, manga and so on). The introduction of can-do statements and situations of everyday life has been a major improvement since the 2010-2015 onward.

Textbook sentences can often be artificiaHy constructed in order to accommodate grammatical objectives without overloading the vocabulary and thus differ from real-life interactions. Ho wever, since the introduction of the CEFR20 principles in the Japan Foundation Standard for Japanese Language Education in 2010, can-do statements and written interaction activities such as participation in on-line chat started widely in teaching Japanese as a foreign language. Japanese instructors who are aware that "it is hard to have an opportunity of communication with Japanese people or Japanese speakers outside of the class overseas"21 have started to use chat activities. It has the advantage that oral communication discourse style appears in this interaction along with some rules of written communication22.

Communicating with native speakers through chat allows students to use statements about various domains such as home, institutions (family or social networks), objects like furniture, clothing, equipment, hygiëne, animals or plants. The can-do statements centered on these topics will provide verbal and nominal phrases that actually can be described as collocations. Making the students aware of the particular characteristics of these phrases is a good strategy to help them remember them. A contrastive approach, where they can compare with the corresponding phrases in their own language, and thus observe similarities or differences, can help them remember the new phrases.

The paradigm of expressions for putting on clothes or accessories is a good example of the pragmatic use of verbs in collocations:

Considering the teaching of collocations at the beginner level, we find most differences between the N+V collocations of the basic verbs between Japanese and most European languages23. Sometimes the Japanese collocations can be counter-intuitive, being deeply embedded in the traditional life and beliefs:

furo ni hairu -> take a bath/prendre un bain/f are il bagno/a face baie

denwa wo kakeru -> make a phone call/donner un coup de f il/f are una chiamata/ a da un telefon

shokuji wo toru -> have a meal/prendre un repas/fare una collazione/a lua masa

yoyaku wo toru -> make a reservation/faire une reservation/effetuare una prenotazione/a face o rezervare

hanashi wo kiru -> hang up/terminer une conversation/chiudere una discussione/a inchide telefonul sau conversatia

sentakki wo mawasu -> start the washing machine/demarrer la machine a laver/avviare la lavatrice/a porni masina de spalat

From the examples we see that European languages use approximately the same verbs in these N+V collocations, while the Japanese have different ideas underlying the verb-noun association.

The above examples in Japanese are stable, non-idiomatic word combinations comparable to the English: to hold a meeting, to ask a question, to take measures, to call the police, to do shopping, to give a ring, etc.

Studies have shown that students of English from various backgrounds have a higher receptive competence in understanding collocations than their productive ability. A study on Italian students of English has shown that in spoken language learners use less collocations than native speakers, and that their collocations exhibited less collocational strength compared to those of native speakers24. The study of large learner corpus data reveals various patterns of language use in learners. Learners from different LI backgrounds reveal distinct error patterns when learning English, because the structure of their native language influences their L2 acquisition.

A study on foreign learners of Persian25 found out that, regardless of their proficiency level, students use a similar number of collocations in their writing. This suggests that collocations are important from the very beginning of language learning. However, more common collocations were observed in the lower-level Persian learners' writing, while higher-level learners use a greater variety of collocations. These findings suggest that collocations are important from the beginning of language learning and should be incorporated into language instruction and assessment.

Collocations are a complex linguistic phenomenon that occupies a key role in the preoccupations of modern linguists. The multifaceted aspects of collocations deserve further investigation and classification and the study of collocations needs to be more closely integrated in language teaching.

References

REFERENCES:

Ahmadighader, S., Sahraee R. (2025), "Collocations in Persian Learner's Corpus: A Study Based on a Phraseological Approach", Journal of Teaching Persian to Speakers ofOther Languages, vol. 14, Issue 1/2025

Askari, H., (2024), "To Teach or not to Teach Collocations in EFL Academie Contexts: An Overview of Current Research and a Response to Reynolds (2019, 2022)", in The Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2, (62-113)

European Council, (2001), The Common European Framework for Reference of Languages.

Khrishnamurthy, R., (2005), "Collocations", in Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. Second Edition, Elsevier Science (596-600)

Muraki, Yoshiko, Arisue, Jun, (2012), "An Attempt to Create Can-do Statements for the Text Chat Activity in Japanese" (pp. 261-269), in 21 Ytizyïlda Asya Dillerinin Ögretimi, ed. Ali Ktictikler and Feyza Görez, Erciyes, Quzei Print.

Ono M., Kobayashi N., Hasegawa M., (2009), Korokeeshon de fuyasu hyögen (Expanding Expression through Collocations), Tokyo, Kuroshio Shuppan

Pawley, A., Syder, F.H., (1983), "Two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike selection and nativelike fluency", in Language and

Communication, ed. Jack C. Richards and Richard W. Schmidt, London&New York, Longman

Poli, F., (2024), "Learner Adverb + Adjective Collocations: A Study on Frequency and Collocationality", in L'analisi linguistica e letteraria, No. XXXII/2024, (131-162)

Puspitasari, D., Dwi Yuliawathi, D., Hanayanti, C.S., (2024), "Deciphering Idioms: A Deep Dive into Elemental Force of Nature Movie

Script", in Inspiring: English Education Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2 (324-339) Trang, N.T., (2024), "An Exploration of Lexical Collocations Employed in EFL Students' Essay Writing", in International Journal of Linguistics and Translation Studies Vol. 5, No.4 (49-61).

Footnote

1 John R. Firth, Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957, pp. 11-12.

2 R. Khrishnamurthy, "Collocations", in Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. Second Edition, Elsevier Science, 2005 (pp.596-600), p. 596-597.

3 Firth, op. cit, p. 12.

4 In a seminal study from 1947, titled "About the basic types of phraseological units in the Russian language", cf. Poli, p. 133.

5 With the 1963 Foundations ofEnglish phraseology cf. Poli, p. 133.

6 Melcuk identified 60 Simple Standard lexical functions from which numerous collocations can be derived, and viewed collocations as relational, with the choice of collocate dependent on the base to convey the intended meaning, cf. Poli, p. 134.

7 Francesca Poli, "Learner Adverb + Adjective Collocations: A Study on Frequency and Collocationality", in L'analisi linguistica e letteraria, No. XXXII/ 2024, (131-162), p. 133

8 Op. cit., p. 134. Cowie identüïed these in his 1998 book, Phraseology: Theory, Analysis, and Applications, Oxford: Oxford University Press

9 F. Poli, op. cit., p. 135

10 Andrew Pawley, Frances H. Syder, "Two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike selection and nativelike fluency", in Language and Communication, ed. Jack C. Richards and Richard W. Schtnidt, London&New York, Longman, 1983.

11 A. Pawley, F.H. Syder, op. cit., p. 199.

12 ibidem, p. 205

13 ibidem, p. 209

14 ibidem, p. 214

15 Hamdollah Askari, "To Teach or not to Teach Collocations in EFL Academie Contexts: An Overview of Current Research and a Response to Reynolds (2019, 2022)", in The Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Sept. 2024), (62-113), p. 65.

16 Ibidem, p. 66

17Nguyen Thu Trang, "An Exploration of Lexical Collocations Employed in EFL Students' Essay Writing", in International Journal of Linguistics and Translation Studies Vol. 5, No.4/2024, (49-61).

18 Trang, op. cit., p. 58-59

19 Desi Puspitasari, Denies Dwi Yuliawathi, CS. Hanayanti, "Deciphering Idioms: A Deep Dive into Elemental Force of Nature Movie Script", in Inspiring: English Education Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2/2024 (324-339), p. 324

20 "The Common European Framework for Reference of Languages", issued by the European Coundl in 200.1

21 Yoshiko Muraki & Jun Arisue, "An Attempt to Create Can-do Statements for the Text Chat Activity in Japanese", in 22 Yüzyilda Asya Dillerinin Ögretimi, ed. AH Kücükler and Feyza Görez, Erciyes, Quzei Print, 2012, p. 262.

22 ibidem

23 Examples are from Masaki Ono, Noriko Kobayashi, Morihisa Hasegawa, Korokeeshon de fuyasu hyögen (Expanding Expression through Collocations), Tokyo, Kuroshio Shuppan, 2009

24 Poli, op. rit, p. 153

25 Shahnaz Ahmadighader, and Sahraee, R. "Collocations in Persian Learner's Corpus: A Study Based on a Phraseological Approach". Journal of Teaching Persian to Speakers ofOther Languages, vol. 14, Issue 1/2025.