Colligation vs. Collocation — What's the Difference?

Reveals grammatical compatibility.

Influences language fluency.

Relationship between words in syntax.

Essential for natural sounding language.

Pertains to grammatical agreement.

Varies with language and culture.

Useful in parsing sentences.

Based on linguistic convention.

Pattern involving parts of speech.

Habitual pairing of words.

To tie or group together.

In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up.

(Logic) To bring (isolated facts) together by an explanation or hypothesis that applies to them all.

The act of collocating or the state of being collocated.

A binding together.

An arrangement or juxtaposition of words or other elements, especially those that commonly co-occur, as rancid butter, bosom buddy, or dead serious.

(logic) The formulation of a general hypothesis which seeks to connect two or more facts.

(uncountable) The grouping or juxtaposition of things, especially words or sounds.

(linguistics) The co-occurrence of syntactic categories, usually within a sentence.

(countable) Such a specific grouping.

A binding together.

A sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance (i.e., the statistically significant placement of particular words in a language), often representing an established name for, or idiomatic way of conveying, a particular semantic concept.

That process by which a number of isolated facts are brought under one conception, or summed up in a general proposition, as when Kepler discovered that the various observed positions of the planet Mars were points in an ellipse.

(mathematics) A method of finding an approximate solution of an ordinary differential equation $L[y]=0$ by determining coefficients in an expansion $y(x)\; =\; y\_\{0\}(x)\; +\; \backslash sum\_\{l=0\}^\{q\}\backslash alpha\_\{l\}\; y\_\{l\}(x)$ so as to make $L[y]$ vanish at prescribed points; the expansion with the coefficients thus found is the sought approximation.

The state of being joined together

(computing) A service allowing multiple customers to locate network, server, and storage gear and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers, at a minimum of cost and complexity.

The connection of isolated facts by a general hypothesis

The act of placing; the state of being placed with something else; disposition in place; arrangement.

A combination of related words within a sentence that occurs more frequently than would be predicted in a random arrangement of words; a combination of words that occurs with sufficient frequency to be recongizable as a common combination, especially a pair of words that occur adjacent to each other. Also called stable collocation. Combinations of words having intervening words between them, such as verb and object pairs, may also be collocations.

A grouping of words in a sentence

The act of positioning close together (or side by side);

It helps learners understand and apply grammatical rules, aiding in accurate sentence construction.

Collocation deals with habitual word pairings based on usage, not grammatical rules, unlike colligation.

Exposure to native language materials, like books and media, helps learners absorb common collocations.

It reveals grammatical structures and relationships, important in linguistic and grammatical research.

Colligation refers to the grammatical linking of words in sentences, focusing on their functional relationships.

"Make a decision" is a common collocation, frequently used together in English.

An example is "she was running," where "was running" colligates as part of a past continuous tense structure.

No, collocations can vary widely between languages and are influenced by cultural and linguistic norms.

Language learning apps and collocation dictionaries are useful tools for mastering these word pairings.

Collocations are common word pairings, while idioms are fixed expressions with meanings not deducible from the individual words.

Linguistic studies and corpus analyses help identify common collocations in any language, guiding learners and translators.

Knowing collocations helps speakers use more natural, idiomatic language, improving fluency.

While basic grammatical structures remain stable, usage and some patterns may evolve with language changes.

Yes, knowledge of collocations can prevent unnatural word pairings that might confuse or sound odd to native speakers.

Effective translation requires understanding the grammatical ties in the original language to maintain meaning.