2. Nominal Collocations Measured by Raw Frequencies
According to Sinclair 1991, p.115 the collocation properties of lexical items are intrinsic and crucial to their meaning. He calls this phenomenon idiom
principle which he describes via collocations. Hoey 2005, p.2 defines collocations as property of language whereby two or more words seem to appear
frequently in each other’s company. Moreover, he states that collocations depict what is natural in a language and what is used by the speaker and they do not
replicate what is theoretically possible in the particular language. Additionally, Hoey 2005, p. 3 proclaims that collocations must not be confused with lexical
co-occurrence, which he defines as co-occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other. He also said that collocations are psychological
association between words up to four words apart and evidenced by their occurrence together in corpora more often than is explicable in terms of random
distribution. Therefore, he considers collocations as psycholinguistic phenomenon for which evidence can be found statistically in computer corpora.
Although the concept of lexical priming is usually associated with other fields of linguistics and psychology, Hoey 2005, p. 8 integrates the concept into
corpus linguistics. In general, he claims that a word is acquired through encountering the lexical item in spoken or written text. Each time a person
reencounters a word its co-text, the collocation, the grammatical pattern, the grammatical function, the associated meaning and pragmatics are mentally
recorded. Furthermore, the mind subconsciously stores the genre, the style, the social situation and the textual positioning of the words are mentally combined.
Hoey 2005, p. 8 calls this process nesting. Lexical priming is an individual human product since every person has unique experiences with linguistic context.
Therefore, not every speaker is primed in the same way. He asserts that corpus can only point towards the priming which is likely to be shared by a large number
of speakers. As a consequence, lexical priming cannot be demonstrated directly by a corpus since a corpus does not represent an individual’s linguistic
experience. However, when the origins of the text samples provided by a corpus are analyzed, the corpus permits assumptions about how a person might be primed
by reading the specific genre and text type. There are left and right collocations which appear before and after the
word. While the nominal collocations in this study focus on the left collocation which is as the subject of the word prohibit and forbid. The data was collected
from COCA and first of all the nominal collocations were investigated to discover the typical types of nouns which are modified by the near-synonyms. Table 2.3
states the top five of the nominal collocations of the two near-synonym words.
Table 2.3 Top lists of nouns modified most frequently by prohibit and forbid measured by raw frequencies
forbid prohibit
god 779
laws 173
heaven 187
rules 124
laws 44
state 87
rules 41
states 86
amendment 15
regulations 84
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