A Dynamic Study Of Collocation And Its Applied Research

Collocation is the integration of grammatical, semantic and pragmatic meanings. It presents certain structural and relational patterns and lives in a dynamic relation with its linguistic context, cognitive context and social-cultural context. Since 1950s, the study of collocation has been on the way and different ideas have been put forward from different perspectives. But we have found that previous studies mainly focused on conventional lexical patterns, structural relations or semantic relations between node and collocate and therefore to some extent static. We believe that collocation lives in language use. Therefore, collocation is in nature dynamic. It is related to language, cognition, and society. There is a lot needed to be done in respect to collocation’s dynamic adaptation to both structural and contextual relations in language use.The primary aim for us to take a perspective from Verschueren’s pragmatics is to go beyond the study of language form and take a macro perspective for a better understanding of collocation. The pragmatic view of language is based on language use, not language resources. Language, culture and cognition are bound together. Language use is a dynamic process of choice and adaptation whereby meaning emerges. Therefore, the study of language is actually at the same time the study of social-cultural life. But Verschueren’s pragmatics contributes little to the micro aspect of language use. The basic view of language in cognitive linguistics is in consistence with Verschueren’s pragmatics. Both theories are based on language use and both believe in the dynamics of meaning production. Hence ideas of the cognitive model and conceptual integration can easily combine to provide more operable theoretical tools for the study of the dynamic adaptative process of collocation in context. The common insight from the two theories is that the study of collocation must turn from static to dynamic, from linguistic to social-cognitive, from language form to language use. It is not only the need of theoretical study but of researches into its applications. With the ideas from Verschueren’s pragmatics and the cognitive linguistic theory, we try to establish the theoretical framework of the dynamic study of collocation and give a detailed analysis of the dynamic adaptive process of collocation in its structural and contextual relations. Through the analysis, we find that during the process of language structural adaptation the instantiation of all kinds of collocation is under the influence of the cognitive model of a language community. The lexical items in conventional collocation usually belong to the same cognitive model and creative collocation is a breakthrough of conventional cognitive model and therefore its generation and understanding must be with strong contextual support. We view collocation as a kind of construction with stability, flexibility and openness. It has different instantiations in different contexts because of the interaction with different physical context, social-cultural context, cognitive context and textual context. The instantiation of collocation construction is the result of its contextual adaptation and at the same time it can also influence language users’ understanding of the context and thus adjust their cognitive model and enrich their cognitive context. In the construction of a discourse, different collocations can help to enrich the meaning of the discourse with its intertextual information and make the discourse into an integrated one through cohesion and coherence.Previous studies on collocation mostly focus on conventional collocation in the phrasal and sentence level. The dynamics and adaptability of collocation in language use is greatly overlooked. The pragmatic perspective of collocation offers us a dynamic framework of collocation interpretation and at the same time integrated language, culture and cognition by placing collocation analysis in the physical world, the social world and the mental world. In the case study, we propose the idea of dynamic collocational ability and apply insights drawn from the dynamic study of collocation to the investigation of collocation information in current College English teaching materials. We also suggest a new way of designing collocation-oriented College English teaching materials. The concept of dynamic collocational ability breaks through the passive state of traditional vocabulary learning and views learners’ activeness as the starting point of language learning. Language learning is not just the mastery of language knowledge but the improvement of learners’ cultural ability, cognitive ability and creativity. The tentative plan of collocational information in English textbooks is based on the principles of language use and second language acquisition, intending to integrate language cultural learning and the development of students’ cognitive ability. The tentative plan has two shining points: the designing of collocation list and the designing of language exercises. The principal goal of the new designing is to emphasize collocation, to guide learners to induce abstract collocational construction from language use and analyze the dynamic relationship between collocation and context so that they can learn about the mode of thinking and social culture of the target language community.The dynamic study of collocation offers us a new perspective on collocation. It is a project of lasting significance and a field worthy for us to explore.