Reading – True/ False/ Not Given – Bài Thực Hành Số 3

Read the following text about ‘collocation‘:

Collocation is defined as a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. Collocation comprises the restrictions on how words can be used together, for example, which prepositions are used with particular verbs, or which verbs and nouns are used together. An example of this (from Michael Halliday) is the collocation: ‘strong tea’. While the same meaning could be conveyed through the roughly equivalent ‘powerful tea’, the fact is that English prefers to speak of tea in terms of being strong rather than in terms of being powerful. A similar observation holds for ‘powerful computers’ which is preferred over ‘strong computers’.

If the expression is heard often, the words become ‘glued‘ together in our minds. ‘Crystal clear‘, ‘middle management’, ‘nuclear family’, and ‘cosmetic surgery‘ are examples of collocated pairs of words. Some words are often found together because they make up a compound noun, for example, ‘text message’ or ‘motor cyclist’.

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