Page 47 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

COLLOCATION

COLLOCATION

The tendency of words to co-occur in everyday discourse. Thus, dark
collocates strongly with night, in so far as they tend to co-occur. The
same could be said of the relationship of deadly to nightshade or nuclear
to weapon. The study of meaning, using this approach, investigates the
meaning of a word in terms of its patterns of collocation, on the
principle (enunciated by R. Firth, a British linguist who first
formulated the notion of collocation) that ‘you shall knowa word
by the company it keeps’. (Compare Wittgenstein: ‘the meaning of a
word is its use in the language’.) Collocation does, however, imply
statistical profiles of patterns of co-occurrence. These have proved
notoriously difficult to produce until recently when it has become
possible to apply sophisticated computational techniques to a very
large corpus of data. Recent dictionaries – for instance, the Collins
Cobuild English Language Dictionary – have been developed using such
techniques.
See also: Semantics

Further reading: Halliday and Hasan (1975)

COMMUNICATION

Interaction by means of mutually recognised signals. Communication
enjoyed great vogue in the mid to late twentieth century as a ‘master
discipline’. Since it was an aspect of virtually all human and quite a bit
of non-human activity, it seemed appropriate for an academic
discipline founded in its name to harbour similar ambitions. Thus
the study of communication began to assume some of the mantle of
philosophy, seeking to explain humanity to itself. Numerous strands of
otherwise disconnected thought contributed to this process:

. From European structural linguistics and Russian formalism came the
idea that there were fundamental structures underlying all human
language. Attempts were made to theorise how signifying elements
were combined in general, not just in a given language (Saussure).
Such an approach to language was soon extended to other
‘signifying systems’, such as literature (Jakobson and the Russian
formalists), the narrative structures of folk tales and narrative
cinema, etc. (Propp, Todorov), and thence to culture in general
(Lotman).

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