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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.
Collocations and compound words pretty much mean what they say. The latter two categories are hierarchical. COLLOCATIONS are more general because they can be either within or across syntactic categories e.g., "row a boat" and "commit suicide" include both verbs and noun or noun phrase; "crystal ball" is a noun phrase.
A phraseme, also called a set phrase, fixed expression, multiword expression (in computational linguistics), or idiom, [1] [2] [3] [citation needed] is a multi-word or multi-morphemic utterance whose components include at least one that is selectionally constrained [clarification needed] or restricted by linguistic convention such that it is not freely chosen. [4]
In linguistics, syntax (/ ˈ s ɪ n t æ k s / SIN-taks) [1] [2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences.Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), [3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning ().
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 ...