A Collocation Inventory for Beginners

This study has two goals – (1) to see what criteria are needed to define collocations and (2) to make a list of the high frequency collocations of spoken English that would be useful for guiding teaching, learning and course design. The existing criteria for defining collocations are generally not well defined and have not been applied consistently. There are more than forty terms used for designating multi-word units. To avoid this confusion, three criteria are strictly applied - frequent co-occurrence, grammatical well-formedness and predictability in L1. The ten million word British National Corpus (BNC)spoken corpus is used as the data source, and the 1,000 most frequent spoken word types from that corpus are all investigated as pivot words. It is found that the three criteria can be applied in a systematic way.