a. Definition and Origin of Collocation
Originally, the term “collocation” was first introduced by a researcher named J. R. Firth Carter and McCarty, 1988: 32. He defined it as the company a
word usually keeps. The definition of collocation itself varies in different researches. Sinclair, one of the pioneers of research on collocation, describes it as
“a frequent co-occurrence of words” lexical item. Carter and McCarthy 1988: 32 define collocation as how words typically
occur with another. In addition, Carter himself further defines collocation as a group of words which occur repeatedly in a language Carter 1992: 47. Another
definition of collocation is the way in which words regularly occur near each other Diegnan, 1998: 35. Palmer 1933, who is considered as the pioneer of
collocation, adopts the term ‘collocation’ for recurring groups of words. He defines a collocation as a succession of two or more words that must be learned as
an integral whole and not pieced together from its component part. Most of the researchers who define the term collocation agree that it is a
lexical unit consisting of a cluster of two or three words from different parts of speech, Baker, 1992; Benson, Benson and Ilson, 1997; Williams, 2002. Most of
the definitions are paraphrases of Firths 1957: 183 definition that collocations are words in habitual company. Those definitions, whic h were proposed by some
researchers, have also developed from time to time together with the development of research on vocabulary acquisition. Based on those definitions, it can be
concluded that in general the term ‘collocation’ refers to the combination of words in which they co-occur together belonging to different grammatical or lexical
categories. The words that that are closely associated with others may depend in their association on the context of a particular situation. Context here refers to
who is using them and where they are being used. For example, power struggle, power boat, power house, power steering all collocate easily and will be used
freely in English in different context.
b. Types of Collocation
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