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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 ...
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.
In rhetoric, zeugma (/ ˈ zj uː ɡ m ə / ⓘ; from the Ancient Greek ζεῦγμα, zeûgma, lit. "a yoking together" [1]) and syllepsis (/ s ɪ ˈ l ɛ p s ɪ s /; from the Ancient Greek σύλληψις, súllēpsis, lit. "a taking together" [2]) are figures of speech in which a single phrase or word joins different parts of a sentence. [3]
In linguistic morphology, collocational restriction is the way some words have special meanings in specific two-word phrases. For example the adjective "dry" only means "not sweet" in combination with the noun "wine". Such phrases are often considered idiomatic.
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".
Collocative meaning, or "collocation", describes words that regularly appear together in common use (within certain contexts). Social meaning, where words are used to establish relationships between people and to delineate social roles. For example, in Japanese, the suffix "-san" when added to a proper name denotes respect, sometimes indicating ...
English sentence structures that grow down and to the right are easier to process. There is a consistent tendency to place heavier constituents to the right, as is evident in the a-trees. Shifting is possible when the resulting structure does not contradict this tendency, as is evident in the b-trees.
phrases formed by the determiner the with an adjective, as in the homeless, the English (these are plural phrases referring to homeless people or English people in general); phrases with a pronoun rather than a noun as the head (see below); phrases consisting just of a possessive; infinitive and gerund phrases, in certain positions;