Kernel Sentence Collocations

The concept of collocation has historical roots. Concentrated effort on this discipline, however, did not really begin until after the 1950's when Firth, leader of the London School, first proposed the term"collocation."Since Firth's initial identification,"collocation"has often been used indiscriminately and with various interpretations and definitions. The broadest definition encompasses everything from the inner structure of an individual lexical item to the organizational properties of a text. In contrast, the narrowest is only interested in those word combinations that are neither free nor fixed. Due to the powerful influence of the Firthian linguistic tradition, collocation studies in western countries are generally focused on restricted combinations. This dissertation endeavors to probe into all types of collocation within the domain of nuclear sentences. Its primary focus is to explore the principles that underlie language phenomena by observing, describing and explaining the combinatory behavior of words. This includes a study of those conditions that restrict such phenomena and their relationships.On the basis of a comprehensive review of the current theoretical background, this work proposes a new theoretical framework for the study of collocation, one oriented towards real language use in real-life situations. All data for analysis was collected from authentic context and is verified in accordance with the intuition of native speakers. Utilizing the philosophical debate concerning"name"and"substance,"evident in the Ancient Chinese tradition, this work will take a theoretical position based on a unified perspective of form and meaning. To be specific: as form symbolizes meaning, collocation is therefore ultimately determined by meaning. Finally, this study offers three classifications of meaning: grammatical meaning, which corresponds to the relation between linguistic signs; conceptual meaning, which conforms to the relation between the sign and the signified; and rhetorical meaning, which represents the relation between the sign and the user.Discussion is presented in three steps. First, an analysis of the restrictive power of grammatical meaning on word collocations in terms of four major basic grammatical categories of gender, number, case and person. The study suggests that grammatical meaning serves as a necessary factor, but is not sufficient in itself for a complete description of collocations. In order for collocations to be semantically sufficient, conceptual meaning must play a decisive role. However, for real-life contexts, conceptual meaning is in itself insufficient for determining collocations. To fulfil the expressive...