Collocations

Collocations

A word's collocates are those words it appears next to or near to. Collocations which occur with high frequency are powerful indicators of a pattern of meaning in a text. They are also useful for studying phraseology and idiom.

Concordance lets you view collocation lists for any headword in the Wordlist View. It shows the collocates of the headword with all words occurring up to four words before and four after the headword.

To view the collocations for a word

Highlight the word you want in the Wordlist View. Then choose Collocations from the Headwords menu. Or right-click anywhere in the Wordlist View to bring up the pop-up menu, then choose Collocations.

Collocations depend on selected contexts

Note that collocations are based on the selected context that you have chosen. For example, if you have made a concordance where each word is given a context of three words before and after the headword, no collocations will be shown for the fourth word to the right and left of the headword, since there is no fourth word to the right or left of any headword in the contexts you have chosen.

To take another example, if your concordance is to verse and you have chosen the verse line (actual line) as context for each word, a word occurring at the start of a line will have no collocates to its left.

This means you could choose to limit your study of collocations to those occurring (say) within a line of verse rather than across line-breaks. To avoid limiting collocations in this way, you need only ensure that you make your concordance with a Context Type of Selected Length and at least 4 words before and after the headword. See Context Styles on the Text menu.

Sorting

When Collocations are first displayed they are sorted in descending frequency order. Click on the frequency column header to re-sort the view, toggling between ascending and descending frequency order. Click on the word column header to re-sort the view, toggling between ascending and descending alphabetic order.

Export

Press the Export button to send the data in all the Collocation Lists to the editor. You can then save them to a file, print them, or copy them to the Windows Clipboard for use in another program as you wish.

Collocation Display

Drag the bottom right-hand corner of the Collocations Form to re-size the view if it cannot all be conveniently seen on your screen. Each list will re-size itself automatically as you alter the size of the main form, provided 'Auto-resize' is ticked.

You can alter the split of the view between the left and right collocations by dragging the maroon splitter.

There are also splitters between each of the four lists of right collocations, and between each of the four left collocations. These let you adjust the size of any single list.

Orientation

Click the Orientation button to alter the arrangement of the eight Collocation Lists on the screen. They can be all vertical or in two rows, right above left.

Re-arranging Columns

You can re-arrange the columns in a Collocation List by dragging a column header to move the whole column to the left or right of an adjacent column.

Re-sizing Columns

Columns in a Collocation List can be re-sized by dragging the divider between two column headers.

If you double-click on the divider between two column headers, the column will re-size itself automatically to fit its contents.