The importance of collocation

One of the most-overlooked aspects of language learning is collocation.  What is it?  It’s the patterns of co-occurrence of words. 

Take a word like “cease”: there are certain set phrases that we associate with the word, such as “cease fire,” “cease and desist”, “wonders never cease”, “cease production”, “cease to exist”, etc.  I would venture to say that, for a word like “cease”, it’s quite rare that someone uses the word at all outside of these well-established phrases. 

Knowing what other words pair with a given word is extremely important. The problem is that so few people are aware of the concept of collocation.  Teachers and textbooks don’t usually provide information about it.  Words are almost always presented in isolation.  Example sentences can be useful, but it’s hard to tell, as a language learner, the quality of the sentences you’re being fed.  If the person creating the sentences doesn’t put a lot of thought into them, they can turn out contrived and misrepresent natural word collocations.

Learners who aren't aware of collocation won’t bother to learn what words go well with each other.  The average language learner thinks of education in terms of vocabulary (which is usually taken to mean individual words) and grammar (which is sentence patterns that are highly organized and repeatable).  Collocation falls somewhere in the middle.