Collocation

[ongetz]

Hello!!!kindly confirm if all these words are collocations:

a.hardly surprising
b.favorite topic
c.people around the world
d.sunny day
e.deepest depression
f. extreme weather
g. destroy homes
h. threaten lives


I'm not really sure about those words that are not underline..Can we consider them collocations? because of the format Adj.+ Noun?

thanks...

[Anglika]

I think you can consider these as collocations.

[ongetz]

Can we consider all of them as collocations??why?could you please give me a concrete explanation?

[Anglika]

Have you found this discussion yet? http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/ge...cations-2.html

[Tdol]

You can always search here and `check the frequency of a pairing or group of words. If you see a pattern, then you've probably got a collocation.
[Davies/BYU] BYU-BNC: British National Corpus
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)

[Clark]

How do you define a collocation?

[Anglika]

See here: Collocations - Glossary Definition - UsingEnglish.com

[Clark]

In my opinion, the criterion "used together regularly" which this source provides doesn't sound like a sufficient reason to consider the above phrases as phraseological units. Following this logic it would hardly be possible to differentiate between a collocation and a non-collocation. I believe there must be some other criteria for considering a word combination as a unit of language. To me they look more like units of speech, like sentence fragments. They connection between elements within such a unit is very loose.