Delatores y chivatos
3. Los campos de trabajo en la provincia de Ourense Una aproximación
As the root of the term discloses, this is another Latin word.
According to the OED it is
collig ation noun. ORIGIN mid 16th cent. (in the literal Latin sense): from Latin colligat- ‘bound together,’ from the verb colligare, from col- ‘together’ + ligare ‘bind.’ The current sense dates from the 1960s.
Interestingly, colligation seems to have been a psychological concept that
was first described by German philosophers and psychologists in the mid
19
thcentury. In 1895 (in the English translation) Oswald Külpe
24describes how emotion fuses things together:
(…) feeling and sensation, according to Külpe, are the elements of conscious processes from which all other mental products are formed, either by 'fusion,' in which the constituent elements suffer loss of distinctness, or by ' colligation,' in which the combined elements gain in distinctness. (Külpe, quoted by Angell 1896: 419)
Yet more detailed is E. B. Titchener’s
25description of how the German
philosopher Wundt defines colligation (I gather Titchener has translated
this from the original German of Beiträge zur Theorie der
Sinneswahrnehmung, 1862, as he makes no reference to an English
edition):
The mind takes cognisance of this paired relationship by an unconscious act of colligation, a form of induction by simple enumeration. Since A has, a thousand times
24 I was only able to find quotations of the original text. 25 ditto.
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over, been followed immediately by a, and B by b, the mind argues that A will in the future always be attended by a, and B by b; or, in general, that an objective sensation will always be attended by a subjective sensation. We are still far removed from perception; the combinations Aa, Bb, leave the component sensations A, a, B, b, just what they were; but we have, in the act of colligation, taken the first step toward perception. (Wundt 1862 quoted in Titchener 1922: 351)
I quote this at length to make clear the link between the use of the term
in linguistics and the use of the term colligation amongst early
psychologists. While the definition of colligation is much broader, as with
the concept of Lexical Priming it indicates that we are dealing with a
psychological concept. Its early definition appears, at the end of the 20th
century, to be brought back into use again and tightened up for a new
purpose.
The OED definition, however, seems to be less specific and more
Firthian in its definition:
In Linguistics: be or cause to be juxtaposed or grouped in a syntactic relation:
[intrans.] the two grammatical items are said to colligate | [trans.] pronouns are regularly colligated with verbal forms.
While traditional grammar used prototypical concepts of colligation
like pre-nominal slots (cf. Bache: 1978), corpus linguists could now
underpin claims with empirical data.
49
Based on the work of language use in context by Malinowski, Firth and
his colleagues
26make use of the term. Firth describes colligation as such:
Colligation represents the syntactic juxtaposition of two or more grammatical categories. Colligation is derived from the concept of collocation which is the means of stating the 'meaning' of the word according to the habitual company it keeps; there is however no necessary relationship between colligation and collocation.
(Firth quoted in Bursill-Hall 1960: 247)
This term has been brought, by Sinclair and Hoey, into wider
circulation, while credit must go to Halliday for keeping the notion of
colligation a live one – in particularly in the context of language learning.
From the 1960s on, however, linguists were concentrating more on other
theories and, until the recent rise of corpus linguistics, the concept of
colligation (though not to the same extent collocation) lay dormant.
Indeed, trawling through all the related literature, mention of
colligation is only fleeting (see e.g. Greenbaum 1988) but it appears to be
not in use as a major concept. It is not clear who brought the term back
into the discussion. Lia (2004) makes a reference to a work by Bahns in
1993
27.
26
The “London Linguists”. These include A.E. Sharp who speaks of colligation and also H.F. Simon, who uses terms like colligates in connection with standard Chinese (Some Remarks on the Structure of the Verb Complex in Standard Chinese. London: SOAS. 1958). Simon makes reference to both Firth & Halliday.
27 However, Bahns never refers to colligation as claimed. Furthermore, he speaks of grammatical collocation, a concept different from lexical collocation and, crucially, different from colligation altogether.
50
We find that John Sinclair in his 1991 book Corpus Concordance
Collocation concentrates on just these three themes. In his paper Trust
the Text from 1990 he discusses the issue of delexicalisation. To my mind,
this work is a first step towards the way of defining colligation the way he
does later:
The meaning of words chosen together is different from their independent meanings. They are partly delexicalised. This is the necessary correlate of co-selection.
(…)
We are given to understand in grammar that adjectives add something to the noun, or restrict the noun … That is no doubt true in some cases, but in the everyday use of adjectives there is often evidence rather of co-selection and shared meaning with the
noun.
(Sinclair [1990] 2004: 20)
Sinclair gives here the example of adjectives, in traditional English
grammar seen as an independent item from the noun. Sinclair highlights
that this is probably only true in a minority of cases. From the co-
selection given above, the Lexical Item – a unit larger than the word – as
well as the Idiom Principle is an obvious extension. It can be assumed
that the next development from here is colligation, the way Sinclair
defines it (in contrast to Firth’s definition). Starting with the publication
of his papers The search for units of meaning and The Lexical Item in
1996/97, Sinclair starts devoting more time to defining and working with
the concept of colligation. This appears first when he discusses the lexical
item “naked eye”:
51
… you can see with the naked eye … / just visible to the naked eye …
The other prepositions are by, from, as, upon & than (…). The word class ‘preposition’ is thus an inherent component of the phrase, accounting for over 90 % of all cases. What we have done, …, is to change our criterion from collocation to colligation, the co-occurrence of grammatical choices (Firth 1957b) to account for greater variation. (Sinclair [1996] 2004: 32)
Though he does not make it explicit here, he actually diverges from Firth
in linking the grammatical choice very clearly to a lexical necessity and
therefore moves away from the split of lexis versus grammar that Firth
still upheld.
Indeed, Sinclair puts colligation squarely in the middle of a continuum:
word collocation colligation semantic preference lexical item 28In The Lexical Item (1997) Sinclair spells out more succinctly what the
hurdles are to move from a traditional view of grammar to the lexis-based
axiom – and how disparate parts can fit together.
… the tradition of linguistic theory has been massively biased in favour of the paradigmatic rather than the syntagmatic dimension. Text is essentially perceived as a series of relatively independent choices of one item after another, and the patterns of combination have been seriously undervalued.
(…)
Word gives information through its being chosen (paradigmatic) and at the same time it is part of the realisation of a larger item (syntagmatic) (Sinclair [1997] 2004: 140f.)
28
A discussion of “semantic preference” follows in 3.2.1.4. Hoey would extend this (Hoey: 2005) by adding a further step: NESTING. The concept of nesting, implies a less linear, more cluster-like relationship where collocations and colligations of the same sets of words can form different relationships.
52
These two approaches can be combined:
.. the two axes of patterning, the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic, are related; the relationship is … quantifiable. The three categories that relate words together on either dimension are collocation, colligation and semantic preference.
(Sinclair [1997] 2004: 141)
This links in with what Sinclair has described in The search for units of
meaning.
Susan Hunston (2001) refers back to this when she defines the term
colligation:
“Colligation” is a term coined by Firth but little used since then. (…) If we take seriously Sinclair’s assertion that there is no longer sense in distinguishing between lexis and grammar (1991:3), then the distinction between collocation and colligation to a large extent disappears. On the other hand, the term “colligation” is helpful in drawing attention to the fact that the evidence of many instances of naturally-occurring language can be used to explain behaviour that is traditionally associated with grammar.
(Hunston 2001: 15)
Nelson (2000), in his unpublished PhD thesis, totally sidesteps
Sinclair when talking about colligation, and repeatedly refers to Hoey
(1997
29). Consequently he quotes:
Hoey (1997) further divided colligation itself into two main classes:
Textual position: The notion that a lexical item may have a strong tendency to occur in a
29 Nelson refers to the paper that laid the foundations for LP: Hoey, M. (1997).
From Concordance to Text Structure: New Uses for Computer Corpora. In: Melia, J. & Lewandoska, B. (eds) Proceedings of PALC 97. Lodz: Lodz University Press.
53
certain textual position rather than others, e.g. at the beginning or end of a text.
Grammatical context: A lexical item will tend to ‘co-occur with a particular grammatical category of items’ (1997:4). The implication of this is that when a word has more than one sense, each sense is found in a different grammatical context, with sense and a specific grammatical context in a direct relationship. (Nelson: 2000. p. 148)
This highlights two important points of Hoey’s work: that words can be
found in a physical location (textual position) as well as in a grammatical
context to disambiguate their meaning. This goes beyond the mere
collocation of words – and Hoey (1997) suggests that it therefore makes
little sense to treat lexical and grammatical relationships as the same –
or to give them the same name. This led to the ‘Drinking Problem’
hypotheses
30:
a) Where it can be shown that a common sense of a word favours common colligations, then the rare sense of the word will avoid those colligations.
b) Where two senses of a word are approximately as common (or as rare) as each other then both will avoid colligational patterns of each other.
c) Where either a) or b) do not apply, the effect will be humour, ambiguity (momentary or permanent), or a new combining of the two senses.31 (Hoey1997: 12)
This shows that a word, if it is to be used unambiguously, will prefer its
restricted colligations. Since 1997, Hoey has added other kinds of
association. At the same time, however, the door for creative use of
language – one of the main features of language per se – is still left open
30 See http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/archive/reports/birm_sem.html for an explanation of these "Whimsically termed hypotheses" (Hoey 2005: 82)
54
while its consequences are described. At the same time it becomes obvious
that Sinclair and Hoey have developed, independently of each other, and
both building on the works of Firth and Halliday, a closely resembling
definition of their use of colligation.
Building on Hoey
32, Susan Hunston (2001), highlights in her conclusion:
In Hoey’s terms, the paper has attempted to illustrate how colligation - the grammatical behaviour of a word in its various senses – links together not only those concerns traditionally treated as “lexis” and “grammar”, but also those concerns traditionally discussed as “text”. It has also demonstrated one half of the phenomenon of repetition (cohesion being the other half), that is, that the phraseology of an individual text repeats the phraseology of innumerable other texts, and derives meaning from this repetition. (my italics – MP-S) (Hunston 2001: 31)
Hunston, in her evaluation of Hoey’s work, does two things. First of all,
her own research proves the viability of Hoey’s ideas with regards to
colligation. Secondly, in saying that “phraseology of an individual text
repeats the phraseology of innumerable other texts, and derives meaning
from this repetition” she already foreshadows one of the key planks of the
Lexical Priming theory – namely that meaning lies in sequences of words
and this meaning is created through repetition.
Stubbs (1996) in his discussion of co-selection and lexico-grammar
suggests why both Hoey and Sinclair came to the same conclusion as to
what colligation should be:
55
Quirk et al. (1985) imply by omission that such exposition [of the clausal object in sentences] is possible for any verb. But corpus data show (Francis, 1993) that two verb lemmas, FIND and MAKE, account for the vast majority (over 98 per cent) of such structures. Such strong probabilistic relations between lexis and syntax should find a place in grammar. (Stubbs 1996: 40)
This shows that intensive corpus work made visible strong correlations of
place and grammatical context of a word. As Hoey (2005: 43) says –
“colligation may simply be an idea whose time has come”.
Finally, in 2005, Hoey gives a tighter definition of the use of colligation in
conjunction with Lexical Priming:
1 the grammatical company a word or word sequence keeps (or avoids keeping) either within its own group or at a higher rank;
2 the grammatical functions preferred or avoided by the group in which the word or word sequence participates;
3 the place in a sequence that a word or word sequence prefers (or avoids). (Hoey 2005: 43)