So far, an agreeable classification and type list of collocation has not been given. According to Benson et al. (1997: xxx-xxxiii), collocation can be classified into lexical and grammatical collocations. As per this, lexical collocation refers to the combination between two content words, which can be further divided into seven sub-categories, shown as table 2.2 below. Some examples cited are given by the researcher, others are taken from Benson et al. (1997: xxx-xxxii).
47
Table 2.2
Classification of English Lexical Collocations
Type Example 1. verb (usually transitive,
denoting creation or activation) + noun / pronoun (prepositional phrase)
make friends; come to an agreement
2. verb (meaning eradication and or nullification) + noun
break a code;
crush (put down) resistance
3. adjective + noun great success; ordinary people
4. noun + verb Alarms go off; Bees buzz (sting, swarm)
5. noun1 + of + noun2 a piece of bread
6. adverb + adjective definitely true
7. verb + adverb suggest strongly
According to table 2.2, noun + verb collocation in which verb is intransitive and verb + noun collocation are two types of lexical collocation. But, the present study argues that this classification needs to provide a further description. Classification of lexical collocation is supposed to lay emphasis on the principle it follows. Lexical collocations can be based on word formation including compound forms based on CA and structural linguistics methodology since the Chinese language does not present morphology as its core grammar. Only following this notion, classification that noun + verb collocation and verb + noun collocation are lexical collocation can be rational in the CA between Chinese and English. In “they succeed” and “achieve success” no morphological form exhibits, so both are type of lexical collocations. The morphological forms shown as ‘friends’ in ‘make friends’, ‘of’ in ‘a piece of bread’, ‘alarms’ in ‘alarms go off’, ‘strongly’ in ‘suggest strongly’ and ‘definitely’ in ‘definitely
48 true’ in table 2.2 all represent a kind of grammatical feature, since there are morphological marks like ‘-s’, ‘of’ or ‘-ly’. Therefore, in this sense these types of collocation are supposed to be classification of grammatical collocation. Grammatical category can be shown by category symbols such as S, NP and V (Richards et al., 2000: 202). According to this, the sentences ‘Alarms go off’ and ‘Bees buzz’, NP ‘a piece of bread’ even including ‘ordinary people’, and verbs ‘break’, ‘crush’ and ‘suggest’ are most likely to fit into grammatical category.
Meanwhile, the given examples “come to an agreement” and “alarms go off” by Benson et al. (1997: xxx-xxxii) are a little bit of inconsistence with the verb + noun / pronoun and noun + verb collocation structures listed. It is obvious that phrasal verbs such as “come to” and “go off” are included in the type of noun + verb and verb + collocations. Namely, the more appropriate type of verb + noun / pronoun and noun + verb collocations are supposed to change into verb / phrasal verb + noun / pronoun and noun + verb / phrasal verb collocation structures in the list of table 2.2. Some previous studies have already stated that noun + verb collocation includes verbs and phrasal verbs in the collocation study of English errors (Li, 2005: 135). Zhao (2005:281) cited some examples about phrasal verbs which are discussed in the type of verb + noun collocations. In whichever case, English verbs or phrasal verbs, morphological change of verb usually takes place in the sentence and thus can be grammatical collocation classification. From the examples ‘alarms go off’ and ‘bees buzz’ (Benson et al., 1997: xxxiii), it shows that phrasal verb ‘go off’ and verb ‘buzz’ are both intransitive. However, from the viewpoint of contrastive analysis between Chinese and English, there are some differences in terms of verb transitivity. In syntax, Chinese includes two grammatical patterns: SVO and SV structure. English subject – predicate structure includes patterns: noun + verb + noun and noun + verb structures (Li, 2005). However, in some cases, Chinese SV structure is equivalent to English noun + verb structure, that is,
49 Chinese intransitive verb is equivalent to English transitive verb. In other cases, English verb presents both transitive and intransitive verbs. Therefore, verb transitivity needs a further description in the types of noun + verb and verb + noun collocations between Chinese and English.
Another ambiguity in the type of noun + verb collocation given by Benson et al. (1997) is that the verb in the structure appears to make reference to act verb such as ‘buzz’ and ‘go off’. However, English verb contains auxiliary verbs involving modal verbs which show grammatical function in a sentence. The auxiliary verb carries no lexical meaning which is linked to act verb and form part of the predicate of a sentence. In the study of collocation, focus is mainly on the collocation between two individual content words or one content word with another particle (preposition) regardless of auxiliary verb. Cowie (1987) stated that more than two words can intervene between the words which go together of the collocation phrases. So, noun + auxiliary verb + act verb can be incorporated into the type of noun + verb collocation between Chinese and English.
According to the type of lexical collocations listed in table 2.2 based on Benson et al. (1997: xxx-xxxiii), there are two types of verb + noun collocations. One is verb (usually transitive) denoting creation or activation + noun / pronoun (prepositional phrase) plus noun collocation. The other is verb meaning eradication and or nullification plus noun collocation (Benson et al., 1997: xxx-xxxii). However, in the study of classification of collocation, these two types are a blending. That is, there is no further distinct between verbs (usually transitive) denoting creation or activation and verbs eradication or nullification in the identification of the type of verb + noun collocation. Li (2005) considered two properties of verbs as the same one without any restriction for meaning of verb. Therefore, regarding this issue whether the verb is restricted to a certain denotation is left gap to the discussion in verb + noun collocation between
50 Chinese and English.
Grammatical collocation refers to the combination between a content word with a grammatical word such as preposition or a grammatical structure such as an infinitive and clause, which can be further divided into eight sub-categories (Benson et al., 1997: xvi and Wang, 2010:17):
Table 2.3
Classification of English Grammatical Collocations
Type Example
1. noun + preposition blockade against; attitudes towards
2. noun + to-infinitive a rule to follow
3. noun + that-clause a proposal that
4. preposition + noun by chance
5. adjective + preposition fond of
6. adjective + to + infinitive (be) essential to do
7. adjective + that-clause (be) apologize that
8. another 19 kinds of English verbal phrases Listed in detail in Benson et al. (1997)
According to table 2.3, English noun + preposition is one type of grammatical collocation, such as “the blockade against” (Benson et al., 1997: xvi). This can be applied into practice only if the preposition in this structure refers to prepositional phrase, such as “the blockade against enemy”. In this structure, the prepositional phrase functions as a post attributive modifier of the noun. But, all the Chinese attributive modifiers (mainly referring to noun and adjective in the present study) precede the head noun without morphological form in syntax and thus are a type of lexical collocation from the classification. This implies that English grammatical noun + prepositional phrase collocation such as “attitudes toward work” is equivalent to Chinese lexical noun
51 + noun collocation 工作(work)态度(attitude).
Besides that, the present study argues that English noun + phrasal verb and phrasal verb + noun collocations fit into grammatical collocation, based on that, “A grammatical collocation is a phrase consisting of dominant word (noun, adjective, and verb) and a preposition or grammatical structure such as an infinitive or a clause” (Benson et al., 1997: xxx-xxxiii).
Originally, the purpose of the classification between lexical and grammatical collocations (Benson et al., 1997) may be to facilitate users to look up collocation of a word from the collocation dictionary. However, substantially, there is no doubt that collocation between two content words in syntax must follow the grammatical rule in any language. Vocabulary and grammar are organically related to each other (Lin, 1997:7). Any word contains knowledge of functional grammar (Huang and Liao, 1997:8), which includes three capabilities, namely, 1) functioning as a constituent in a sentence, 2) combination between one content word with another, 3) combination between a content word with a particle (or function word) (Huang and Liao, 1997:8). Without referring to syntax, the notion of collocations becomes vacuous (Asmaa, 2008:28). Therefore, noun + verb collocation has grammatical and lexical semantic aspects in English syntax. This is true of Chinese noun + verb collocation, which is referred to as syntactic and lexical semantic aspects from topic-comment structure. On the one hand, the selection between two words must follow rules from the classification of lexical collocation. Wang (2010:17) stated that English verb + noun collocation errors included wrong choices of words and some grammatical mistakes. This implies that English verb + noun collocation includes lexical and grammatical aspects in the error analysis. Collocations deal with how words combine into phrases, sentences and texts with each other (Benson et al.: 1997: ix). Thus, it is difficult to separate grammatical aspect from collocation in the study. Because of this, the collocation is supposed to be
52 considered from both lexical and grammatical aspects, specifically, from lexical collocations (lexical semantic restriction) and grammatical collocations (from morphology and syntax) in the contrastive analysis between Chinese and English.