Exploring the Lexical Approach: Understanding Collocation

collocation approaches

Lexical approach

The lexical approach was seen by Firth ,who considers as a first person that described the term of collocation , was well-known as a father of them. The concept of this trend concentrates on that "words obtain their meanings from the words with which they co- occur" (Gaballa and AL-khayria, 2004).

According to Firth (1957) views that collocation is an detached element of grammar and he considers collocations as ' mode of meaning'. He asserts that the classification of the lexical meaning into four levels are important matter such as the orthographic, the phonological, the grammatical and the collocation level. The reason of the use the word peer as an example by Firth to explain the levels of the

Then, the grammatical level, the word peer sometimes used as a verb and a noun.

In order, other element will be added to meaning. Lastly, the collocational level, when the word peer is a parallel ,it obtains a further meaning (Gitsaki 1999).

The stylization of lexicon has deemed as an integral elements of grammatical approach by Halliday, when he quoted by AL-zahrani(1998). He conducted that the concept of group seems as another scope of the collocability words. Halliday, Sinclair(1966, when quoted by AL-zahrani 1998) sees that collocation and grammar, as being two dissimilar sides. The author clarified that the way of selections arrange a language structure , for instance,( passive and active choices).

Semantic approach

The semantic approach is looking for collocation as an independent component from grammar. Undertaking of this trend tries to give an explanation about the reason of assemblage certain words with each other(Lehrer 1974). The arbitrariness of collocational relationship is deemed as weakness point to the study of collocations in the semantic approach. This means that lexical trend relied on collocations when