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Skilled users of the language can produce effects such as humor by varying the normal patterns of collocation. This approach is popular with poets , journalists and advertisers . Collocations may seem natural to native writers and speakers, but are not obvious to non-native speakers.
There are two forms: repetition and collocation. 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.
Collocations can be in a syntactic relation (such as verb–object: make and decision), lexical relation (such as antonymy), or they can be in no linguistically defined relation. Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent use of a language: a grammatically correct sentence will stand out as awkward if collocational preferences are ...
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [40] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous. While not noticeable ...
For example the adjective "dry" only means "not sweet" in combination with the noun "wine". 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."
The sentence "time flies like an arrow" is in fact often used to illustrate syntactic ambiguity. [1] Modern English speakers understand the sentence to unambiguously mean "Time passes fast, as fast as an arrow travels". But the sentence is syntactically ambiguous and alternatively could be interpreted as meaning, for example: [2]
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
1st edition: Includes 75,000 collocations, 80,000 examples, 7,000 synonyms and antonyms, academic words list, academic collocations list (2,500 most frequent collocations based on analysis of the Pearson International Corpus of Academic English). 1-year subscription includes additional collocations and synonyms, interactive exercises. [11]