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In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom , where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated.
Compounds are units of meaning formed with two or more words. The words are usually written separately, but some may be hyphenated or be written as one word. Often the meaning of the compound can be guessed by knowing the meaning of the individual words. It is not always simple to detach collocations and compounds. car park; post office; narrow ...
Repetition uses the same word, or synonyms, antonyms, etc. For example, "Which dress are you going to wear?" – "I will wear my green frock," uses the synonyms "dress" and "frock" for lexical cohesion. Collocation uses related words that typically go together or tend to repeat the same meaning. An example is the phrase "once upon a time".
Such phrases are often considered idiomatic. Another example is the word "white", which has specific meanings when used with "wine", "coffee," "noise," "chess piece," or "person." These usages can be said to be idiomatic because in each case the word "white" changes from its normal usage.
In linguistics, a verb phrase (VP) is a syntactic unit composed of a verb and its arguments except the subject of an independent clause or coordinate clause.Thus, in the sentence A fat man quickly put the money into the box, the words quickly put the money into the box constitute a verb phrase; it consists of the verb put and its arguments, but not the subject a fat man.
Collocations are relatively free in their syntactic use, much more than ie. proverbs are. I think another good example of a collocation is the word "commit" in English. Commit has a relatively fixed set of words which co-occur with it. Commit is very often found with crime words like: commit (a crime / suicide / murder / etc.).
The distinction between literal and figurative language exists in all natural languages; the phenomenon is studied within certain areas of language analysis, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics. Literal language is the usage of words exactly according to their direct, straightforward, or conventionally accepted meanings: their ...
Phrasal verbs ordinarily cannot be understood based upon the meanings of the individual parts alone but must be considered as a whole: the meaning is non-compositional and thus unpredictable. [ a ] Phrasal verbs are differentiated from other classifications of multi-word verbs and free combinations by the criteria of idiomaticity, replacement ...